Ghent University, the University of Antwerp and Biotools are creating the European Centre for Chirality (E2C) to advance the understanding of the role that chirality plays in biological processes.
The EC2 will aim to help academic and industrial scientists develop a broad range of chirality-related applications through offering services such as: the determination of absolute chiral configurations; Vibrational Optical Activity (VOA) measurements; computational modelling including expert consultancy; education workshops; and open-access VOA instrumentation.
The centre, based at Antwerp and Ghent, Belgium, will comprise a team of dedicated scientists using an array of advanced analytical instrumentation and modelling software to fulfil the demanding analysis tasks.
Dr Edwin Kellenbach, departmental head analytical sciences at Merck, said: 'The challenge faced by many of us working in the pharmaceutical sector is to obtain high-quality data about chirality sufficiently early in the discovery of new molecules to be able to make decisions that will determine the success or failure of the molecules in achieving clinical efficacy and safety.
'EC2 will help scientists meet these challenges,' he added.
'To further support the research needs of scientists we will also offer open-access services through EC2 and provide fast, affordable access to critical analysis, modelling and expertise,' said Frank Trundle, managing director of Biotools Europe.
Dr Sergey Sergeyev, chief operations officer at EC2, said: 'The creation of EC2 will enable many scientists to gain easy access to a wide body of knowledge, know-how and advanced VOA instrumentation to provide fast and reliable chirality-based analyses.
'This, combined with our consultancy and training programmes, will help to provide deeper insights into molecular structure and function,' he added.
The centre will open on 2 December 2010, when it will hold a day-long scientific programme and showcase Biotools instrumentation.
