Quicker and cheaper discovery of popular medications in the near future
According to a new study, scientists may be able to create new popular medications for a range of diseases - all with just a computer.
Could science forever change the way researchers go about drug discovery? According to a new study, scientists may be able to create new popular medications for a range of diseases - all with just a computer.
The recent study, appearing in the journal Chemistry & Biology, is the joint effort of researchers at Collaborative Drug Discovery in Burlingame, Calif., and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey at New Jersey Medical School. The team has worked together to effectively train computers to scrutinize drug libraries and pick out individual compounds that are likely to eradicate tuberculosis while minimizing side effects.
The study explains that the current process for identifying and testing potential drugs is called high-throughput screening. It uses technology to similarly test thousands of compounds, but is extremely costly and has yet to generate any promising anti-TB drug possibilities. Furthermore, even promising compounds often turn out to have components toxic to humans.
The new team's method drew from the publicly available data for TB, and the researchers then programmed the computers to not only understand what makes a good TB drug but which compounds are also associated with toxicity to human cells. What the computers came up with were a series of agents capable of killing TB bacteria and rediscovered a compound that four decades ago was reported as an anti-TB possibility but was then forgotten.
The future of medicine
New TB-fighting Canadian drugs aren't the end of what the research team hopes to accomplish.
"If we can pick and choose a small number of compounds to test rather than screening libraries of thousands of molecules, then it's cheaper and immediately brings the compounds of most interest to the forefront," said Sean Ekins, Ph.D., the lead author of the study.
According to the National Institutes of Health Drug Discovery Interest Group, the area of research may have been considered intellectual backwaters at one point, but it's currently growing into an important discipline, and one that's being changed by - and in turn changing - the sciences of molecular biology and other fields.
The findings of the study's research group could have a significant effect on pharmacology in the future and may even drastically reduce costs in a tight-budget economy.
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