Protein folding: Much more intricate than we thought (2017)

[pal_ankit]

It is one of the biggest problems in modern biology. The news that Deepmind’s A.I has shown extremely high accuracy results on the protein folding problem will accelerate Bioinformatics and biology research. The implications for drug discovery are enormous.

[whateveryou381]

I know that people say this but I have questions: 1. Are there concrete examples where drugs have been discovered from protein folding structures? What are the biggest ones? 2. Is there machinery that already exists to take in 3D protein structures and create drugs? or is this yet another issue? 3. How does folding of a protein in the current state impacting the use of the protein when it is used? Presumably these proteins are similar to polymers where they are not super rigid in all environments, how does the environment effect the protein folding?

[SAI_Peregrinus]

It's one stage, and it's an important stage, but it's not the most important stage for speeding up discovery. Most of the wasted time is due to developing drugs for what look to be promising targets, taking them into the clinic, and finding that they don't actually do anything to the disease even if they're perfect at affecting the target in the desired way.

Protein folding will help develop candidates faster. That's good. But it won't seriously help find the right targets faster, so I don't expect a substantial speedup in overall drug development times.

[jackcviers3]

> The implications for drug discovery are enormous.

As every disease has a mechanism via a protein channel, and all cells are made of proteins, doesn't this open the possibility of curing nearly any disease for which we understand it's mechanism and for which we can conceive of a protein shape to block or rebuild the tissue damages caused by such a disease? Delivery will still be an issue, but I don't see how this couldn't be used to prevent metastasis in tumors by custom created blocking proteins, for example.

[deepstack]

For sure, it is probably just another perspective that has not being discovered yet that is why it seems like black magic. For example, we already know Muon And Neutrino particles are just flying around with very little interaction with our 3D world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Muon_And_Neutrino_De...

Who know what else is flooding around.

[lowkeynthorough]

DeepMind actually solved harder problems than most of the ones mentioned. All the proteins mentioned in the article (except for the chaperones) are 100 amino-acid and shorter, the therapeutic ones are even shorter, dozen(s) of AA. Thus, great preview of what is to come, though its from (2017). C&EN is truly the quantamagazine of biochem...

[catominor]

sorry, I think I'm out of the loop, what do you mean regarding the quanta magazine reference? Is that a good or bad thing?

[jbj]

To avoid a misconception, it is not known how a protein fold (as a verb) what is known, is how the final product is folded. The actual folding process may involve other molecules to assist the biolocical process

[fabian2k]

We do know quite a bit about how proteins fold in the cell, though of course there is likely still a lot to discover there. Chaperones are known for a long time now, and there's been plenty of research on them.

[ramraj07]

That's like saying "it's not known how stars form" because obviously we have not lived for a billion years to see a star form fully. We haven't seen a single Protein molecule fold fully, but we're pretty sure we know how it does (though some details are kinda murky).

[chaps]

(2017)