20 upvotes, 0 direct replies (showing 0)
Most of designing a new medicine is making a new molecule that sticks to a protein and either activates or inactivates it. If we can see the shape of the protein, it can be easier to design something that fits in the target (maybe the protein has a narrow pocket here I can fill with a phenyl group, maybe a more open one that I target with a trifluoromethyl - maybe there's a lysine so I want a negative, or partially negative region in my molecule to interact with that in a favorable electrostatic interaction, etc). That being said, knowing how to bind to the protein is only one of a number of steps towards a new medicine, but anything that accelerates one of them has the change to speed development.
This of course presumes that we understand the disease sufficiently to know that the protein is implicated in the causation of said disease. That is another, bigger problem altogether. Been on a number of programs where the early studies looked good, but when we dug deeper the whole thing unraveled (there's many reasons that can happen, including some that are literally just bad luck).
There's nothing here!