A new Center of Economic Excellence at the Medical University of South Carolina will focus on creating new drugs for cancer, arthritis, diabetes and other diseases.

The $10 million Lipidomics, Pathobiology and Therapy Center of Economic Excellence will recruit two endowed chairs to take lipidomics research that's already being done at MUSC and translate it into drugs, treatment and clinical research.

MUSC professor Lina Obeid and Yusuf Hannun, director of MUSC's basic sciences division and deputy director of Hollings Cancer Center, have been leading the research at the university with a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Research currently under way can be parlayed into drugs to treat colon cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, arthritic diseases, stroke and diabetes, among other maladies.

Obeid, who has been researching lipidomics for the past 20 years, said, "We are already a nationally recognized expert on lipidomics research, but we want to take it to the next phase. We want to be recognized for drug development."

Obeid said the center needs to recruit those people who already have expertise in translating research into the creation of drugs, to bridge the gap for the program.

"With the new center, we envision building a program that will attract the best investigators from around the world, giving South Carolina a strategic advantage in new discoveries that will benefit a wide range of patients," MUSC president Ray Greenberg said.

The new CoEE also has the potential to create spin-off drug development companies, and several have already started doing research on some of these lipid compounds.

The Lipidomics, Pathobiology and Therapy Center of Economic Excellence is being funded by a $5 million contribution from the CoEE program and a matching $5 million that MUSC is raising.