Meet Compounds Australia: the Queensland library driving global health discoveries
Meet Compounds Australia: the Queensland library driving global health discoveries
The cornerstone of modern biomedicine is creating drugs or treatments that solve medical problems to improve – or even save – lives. But once you have an idea for a drug, how do you start your research?
Much like any other research, the answer begins at a library, only this one doesn’t contain a single book, and nothing in its collection can be easily seen by the naked eye.
What’s more, one of the library’s collections, containing 330,000 items, was moved halfway across to the world to a new home in Queensland ...
There is no doubt Queensland’s world-class biomedical ecosystem – boasting a wealth of innovative biomedical companies and research institutions, established and emerging health precincts and a highly-skilled workforce – is going from strength to strength.
Our department has been proud to support the development of this high-value industry through homegrown success stories like Vaxxas and world-class partnerships including the $280 million Translational Science Hub.
But where does any new drug or treatment research begin? The answer, more often than not, is inside a building nestled among the eucalypts of Toohey Forest at Griffith University’s Nathan Campus. A particularly important library called Compounds Australia.
Compounds Australia: boosting the world’s wellbeing
Compounds Australia, located within the Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery (GRIDD), is Australia’s only dedicated chemical compound management facility – in simple terms, a collection of libraries containing over 1.5 million samples of the chemical and organic compounds that medical research scientists can use to test their ideas for new drugs and treatments.
Just like a library, there are expert staff available to assist in over 150 drug discovery and research projects annually from organisations across the biotech and pharmaceutical sectors.
Each library in Compounds Australia is an expertly curated collection of small molecules such as drug-sized chemical compounds or smaller-sized compound fragments.
Director of Compounds Australia, Professor Sally-Ann Poulsen, says the libraries contain the starting points for biomedical drug discovery.
‘Compound management is at the start of the drug discovery pipeline,’ says Professor Poulsen. ‘Researchers often need to test many hundreds of thousands of individual compounds to identify the right compounds that hit – bind to or have activity against – a disease target or causative agent, like a parasite or bacteria.’
Compounds Australia provides researchers with the critical management infrastructure and expertise to ensure they can access flexible, efficient, reproducible, and cost-effective compounds for their biomedical research and increase the success rate of drug discovery.
‘The long-term impact of good compound management is to improve the research outcomes and ultimately enhance the health and wellbeing of Queenslanders and people globally,’ Professor Poulsen adds.
Enabling life-changing research
Compounds Australia’s services are used by a range of public and private organisations within the biotech, pharmaceutical and drug discovery areas including universities, medical research institutes, not-for-profits and industry members.
Individual members include researchers and scientists of all levels, predominantly involved with drug discovery and development (for example The Zero Childhood Cancer Program has used Compounds Australia’s libraries to help refine and personalise treatments for children with high-risk cancers). Other important research areas include ovarian cancer, malaria and Parkinson’s disease.
Members can access assay-ready plates (flat plates with multiple tiny reservoirs known as “wells” which hold specific compounds) through consultation with Compounds Australia staff or through an open access database, allowing compounds to be easily and quickly provided to the member for testing.
Professor Poulsen explains that this process enables researchers and scientists to avoid the often time-consuming, laborious and error-prone procedures in compound preparation and provision.
‘We enable our members to focus on the science outcomes rather than complex compound logistics,’ she says. ‘We de-risk the drug discovery process, reducing costly attrition and enhancing the likelihood of success.’
By the numbers
Compounds Australia was established in 2008, and throughout its fifteen years of operation has benefited from $5.925 million in funding from the Queensland Government to help the facility grow to match the extraordinary demand for its services.
In 2022 alone, the facility supported 62 research groups with over 250 active individual users across 143 projects, delivering over four million wells and processing nearly 4,400 individual runs on their specialist equipment.
In this same year, 423,005 samples were lodged into the Compounds Australia collection, taking the number of small molecule and natural product samples in the facility to over 1.5 million.
Compounds Australia sits as part of the Griffith Institute of Drug Discovery, established in 2003 as the Eskitis Institute for Cell and Molecular Therapies with a Queensland Government commitment to allocate $12 million in support (including $6 million in the form of the world’s smallest cheque!).
It’s only natural
GRIDD and Compounds Australia are also home to unique libraries like NatureBank - one of the largest natural product collections in the southern hemisphere. NatureBank consists of over 126,000 samples of natural product extracts and product fractions derived from Australian plants, fungi and marine invertebrates, along with more than 30,000 archived biota samples.
NatureBank is accessed by scientists around the globe to discover new compounds from nature with potential for development into new drugs, animal health products, agrichemicals, food ingredients or additives, nutraceuticals, cosmeceuticals and other industry applications.
The big move: from Scotland to Queensland
One of CA’s most notable libraries is the Australian Drug Discovery Library (ADDL). This collection of 330,000 compounds is notable not only for its potential to build life-saving medical treatments, but also that most of the compounds made a journey of over 16,000 km to get there.
The ADDL was designed and assembled by a collaborative Australian Lead Identification Consortium (ALIDC) alongside Griffith University, including:
- Children’s Cancer Institute Australia for Medical Research (CCIA)
- Canthera Discovery (CTx CRC Ltd)
- UniQuest Pty Limited (UniQuest) and
- Walter & Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI)
The majority of the library compounds were held at BioAscent in Scotland, but in 2020 the ALIDC decided to begin the process of transferring the entire library to Compounds Australia.
From September to December 2020, as part of a $1.875 million grant from the Queensland Government’s Research Infrastructure Co-investment Fund, the entire library was moved through two large shipments, with nearly 4,000 racks of microtubes containing thousands of compound samples packed on dry ice (kept at -178 °C) in insulated and temperature-controlled boxes for the journeys of some 16,000 km.
However, as Compounds Australia’s Acting Facility Manager Rebecca Lang explains, once the compounds arrived, the work had only just begun.
‘The compounds arrived in a variety of different microtubes, none of which matched the microtubes we used for storage,’ she says. ‘The contents of the 330,000 tubes from Scotland therefore had to be transferred.’
Despite working in an industry where much is automated, the complicated process of integrating the new compounds into Compounds Australia’s storage was a lengthy, multiple step process involving not only transferring compounds from one container to another, but also cross-referencing and tracking millions of lines of data.
‘It took two staff a full 18 months to complete the process,’ Rebecca explains. ‘Throughout this time, we also maintained all our other operations to support our members.’
With support provided by the ALIDC and National Collaborative Research Infrastructure (NCRIS) Therapeutic Innovation Australia platform (which also co-funds Compounds Australia), the ADDL forms an integral part of Queensland and Australia’s biomedical sector’s world-class contribution to drug discovery research, with Compounds Australia responsible for its storage, curation, plating and shipping.
Queensland’s biomedical industry is safeguarding your health
Compounds Australia and the Australian Drug Discovery Library is just one of the many examples of how we’re supporting Queensland biomedical success.
Find out more about our achievements on our dedicated Biomedical Homepage.
Last updated: 14 Jun 2023