14 DAY TRIAL // When scientists get to work on a specific drug, they usually design it in a manner that they believe is only suitable for treating a single medical condition. However, over the years, it has become apparent that, while this may be the case for some types of medication, the limitation does not apply to all substances. Some of them can be used in treatments for diseases that aren't even remotely close in symptoms to the ones the drugs were originally designed for. Now, a new software makes it possible to detect these associations very easily. The innovation has already created thousands of new drug-target associations so far, Nature News reports.
According to the team behind the new software, the algorithm works by comparing the molecular structure of the drug with naturally-occurring compounds inside the human body. In addition to being able to dictate new associations between drugs and diseases, the new system may also be suited especially for discovering overlooked side effects in medicine already on the market. These inconsistencies may very well represent that minor percentage of each drug test trial that develops extreme reactions even to the most harmless drug.
“It's a new approach, and it's a totally different from what everyone else has done. That's why it actually works,” University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill (UNC) pharmacologist Bryan Roth says. He is the author of a new study detailing the system, which appears in the November 1 online issue of the respected scientific journal Nature. The new computational method also has another great advantage over today's association methods. Rather than simulate whether drug compounds fit with proteins in the target like a key in a lock, it can analyze the high-resolution protein structures that it has in the database for an answer on compatibility.
University of California in San Francisco (UCSF) computational chemist Brian Shoichet believes that the new method is “a way of giving you decent molecular-based hypotheses for side effects of drugs and a way of looking for new targets for these very special molecules.” Adds Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research chemoinformatician Jeremy Jenkins: “The pharmaceutical industry should take note of this work. This could really help us improve on preventing safety issues, which are one of the major contributors to drugs failing.”