Historically Black North Carolina Central University has partnered with North Carolina State University to boost drug discovery research, increasing opportunities for development of marketable products at both institutions.
The partnership will allow for collaboration between NC State’s Comparative Medicine Institute and NCCU’s Biomanufacturing Research Institute and Technology Enterprise (BRITE), which contains a library of over 200,000 chemical compounds and high-throughput screening equipment. Additionally, the new agreement will permit NCCU to offer NC State-based startup companies access to high-throughput screening on a fee-for-service basis, enabling them to maintain intellectual property rights.
“We will help each other,” said Dr. Heman Navarro, director of BRITE. “This partnership will allow us to take better advantage of each other’s strengths, leading to new opportunities for collaboration, drug-discovery grants, and intellectual property that can be licensed with the revenue reinvested in research.”