World's largest video database of proteins promises better drugs
Spanish scientists have unveiled the world's largest video database of proteins, a boon for pharmaceutical companies looking to design better drugs more quickly.
A team of researchers led by Modesto Orozco at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Barcelona spent four years running calculations on the MareNostrum supercomputer to build the data bank, which holds more than 1,700 proteins and is accessible through the Internet.
Nicknamed MoDEL, the database was constructed to assist the study the basic biology of proteins, with the hopes that it will accelerate the design of new pharmaceutical agents.
“Nowadays, we design drugs as if the proteins against which they are to act were static, and this goes a long way to explain failures in the development of new drug therapies, because this is not a true scenario," Orozco said in a statement. "With MoDEL, this problem is solved, because it offers the user from 10,000 to 100,000 photos per protein, and these confer movement to these structures and allow a more accurate design."
Orozco said several pharmaceutical companies are already using the MoDEL strategy to develop the first drugs against cancer and inflammatory diseases, which could become available as soon as this year.
The scientists used an international catalogue of static protein structures -- about 40,000, in fact -- called the Protein Data Bank. The researchers' database goes further by providing videos of the proteins' movement.
It may be a small subset of proteins, but researchers say the structures are quite similar, allowing for roughly 40 percent representation of all known protein structures.
Of those, MoDEL covers more than 30 percent of the human protein structures of pharmacological interest.
Moving forward, the scientists plan to focus on relevant proteins in human diseases, with a goal of covering 80 percent of pharmaceutical targets within the next two to three years.
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com