Finding a chemical that can target a disease is akin to finding a needle in a haystack.

So the National Institutes of Health, with the aid of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and eight other academic centers, has decided to analyze the haystack.

As part of the NIH Roadmap, a new initiative meant to jump-start research leading to new treatments, Pitt researchers will receive $9 million over the next three years to analyze the biological activity of hundreds of thousands of chemical compounds.

The NIH yesterday announced the nine institutions that will comprise its $88.9 million Molecular Libraries Screening Centers Network. The University of Pennsylvania also was designated a center; others included Columbia University Medical Center in New York, Emory University in Atlanta, and the Scripps Research Institution in La Jolla, Calif.

Pitt's operation will fill all of the 10th floor and part of the ninth in its new Biomedical Sciences Tower 3 and involve collaborators in Pitt's chemistry department, Carnegie Mellon University and Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M.

"This is enabling drug discovery, as opposed to drug development," said pharmacologist John Lazo, principal investigator for the new University of Pittsburgh Molecular Libraries Screening Center.

But the expertise gained with the sophisticated new equipment that will be purchased or developed for the new center -- $500,000 worth in the coming year alone -- should be a boon to local efforts to develop new drugs, he said.

And if, as expected, the NIH decides to consolidate the screening efforts into just three large national centers three years from now, Pitt officials expect to have a leg up on the competition for that designation, Lazo said.

Linda Brady, director of the NIH's molecular libraries project team, said no decision will be made for another year or two on whether the number of centers will be reduced or expanded.

"We really don't know what is going to work best," she explained.

The NIH is developing capabilities similar to those of large pharmaceutical companies, where scientists routinely search through billions of compounds to find the handful that might treat a particular disease. These searches are estimated to account for 5 percent of the cost of developing each new drug.

Typically, researchers identify a protein that is involved in a disease process and then try to find a chemical that interferes with that protein, in hopes it might make a good drug treatment.

Some of the compounds analyzed by the new screening network may lead to new drugs, but NIH officials say they are also interested in other compounds that might not serve as drugs but have effects on cells that will allow researchers to study how those cells work. Those compounds could become part of the toolbox used by basic scientists, as well as lead to new diagnostic tests.

"This new screening centers network will be the engine of discovery in the NIH Roadmap molecular libraries initiative," said Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health. The Bush administration budgeted $333 million for the overall Roadmap program for the coming year, a 42 percent increase in what was otherwise a tight domestic budget.

Insel, who will be in Pittsburgh today to address the International Conference on Bipolar Disorders at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Downtown, said the network "should provide researchers with many new chemical tools to explore how cells function at the molecular level."

Brady said competition for the new centers was open to both academic and commercial organizations, though the experts who reviewed the applications ended up favoring academic centers. Among those favored centers, NIH officials chose those with abilities that seemed to complement the others, she said.

Lazo said one of Pitt's strengths was its expertise in optical imaging techniques, including fluorescent dye techniques developed at Carnegie Mellon's Molecular Biosensor and Imaging Center. Also important is the fact that Pitt's chemistry department is just a few blocks away from the medical complex.

"Having this close proximity makes us quite competitive with places like Harvard and Johns Hopkins," he said.

The program will begin July 1. By the third year, each center is supposed to screen 100,000 molecules a year using 20 different analytical approaches.

The findings on each compound analyzed by Pitt and other members of the screening network will be made freely available to public and private researchers through an online database, PubChem.

But Lazo said he also anticipates that promising molecules will be sent to the Center for Chemical Methodologies and Library Development, a $10 million NIH-funded group in Pitt's chemistry department. The center can synthesize variations on the molecule and identify the most potent version.

"This refines the molecule and makes it more drug-like," he explained.

In addition to possible drug and technology spinoffs, Lazo said the availability of technologies otherwise found only in large pharmaceutical firms will help attract excellent students.

"I think what it will do is enrich their academic environment," Brady said. "I think it's going to change the academic culture in the way they do science."