A new approach to targeting cancer cells that circumvents a challenge faced by currently available cancer drugs has been developed.
A research team from the University of California, Riverside, has explored the development of drugs that target potentially reactive amino acids other than the currently-targeted cysteine, such as lysine, tyrosine, or histidine, which occur more often within the binding site of the target.
Maurizio Pellecchia, a professor of biomedical sciences in the School of Medicine, who led the research explained that academic researchers, the biotechnology industry, and pharmaceutical companies are heavily pursuing the design of “covalent drugs” that bind irreversibly with their targets. Those that target cancer cells most often target cysteine because it is more reactive than all other amino acids in a protein target.
This article highlights the scope for developing therapeutics with new innovative, alternative approaches. The current trillion dollars pharmaceutical industry is in peril where the current drug development pipeline is slow, inefficient and incapable of being extended to multi-combination drug therapies as well as minimally focused on prevention. The complex modeling of diseases and biological functions has been limited because of the inability to integrate large scale molecular pathways.
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