Malaria and tuberculosis continue to have devastating impacts in much of the world, particularly in the former Soviet Union and sub-Saharan Africa. A recent gift of $7.25 million from Howard Milstein '73 and Abby Milstein will target these diseases and others that affect the developing world by establishing the Abby and Howard P. Milstein Chemistry Core Facility and the Abby and Howard P. Milstein Program in Chemical Biology at the Weill Cornell Medical College (WCMC).

Specifically, the gift will be used to create and staff a core facility that will design and purify compounds to support research in a new chemical biology program, as well as helping scientists study many other diseases.

"The facility will capitalize on the wealth of exciting new genomic information by inventing new tools for biology -- chemicals that specifically inhibit the products of individual genes," says Dr. Frederick Maxfield, chair of Department of Biochemistry and Structural Biology, which will be home to the new facility.

The new, multidisciplinary chemical biology program will combine genetics, biochemistry, molecular biology and immunology with chemical biology to create novel chemical compounds with which to validate drug targets. Ultimately, compounds of significant interest will be donated to public-private partnerships that are oriented toward not-for-profit drug development, fostering collaboration between the medical research and business communities.

"This is a very important step that will enable us to make significant progress towards developing new therapies," said Dr. Antonio Gotto Jr., dean of WCMC. "It also represents a new type of partnership between philanthropy, academia and industry."

Dr. Carl Nathan, the R.A. Rees Pritchett Professor of Microbiology and chair of the WCMC's Department of Microbiology and Immunology, will direct the Program in Chemical Biology. He is specifically interested in combating antibiotic-resistant strains of tuberculosis and malaria that have evolved over the last half-century, an area largely neglected by pharmaceutical industry because of its poor market value.

According to the Global Forum for Health Research, less than 10 percent of global spending on medical research goes to conditions that account for greater than 90 percent of the global disease burden, a problem that has come to be known as the 10/90 gap.

"The question is, do we want to go back to a time when life-threatening infections are considered routine?" asked Nathan. "This is not a past we want as our future. University-based scientists can step in and help find solutions to these diseases."

Gabriel Miller is a writer with Weill Cornell Medical College's Office of Public Affairs.