| Regarding the biology: - One of the strategies in drug development is to find a protein that is more present in people who have a disease versus those who don't (called "overexpressed" proteins), and attempt to stop this protein from work correctly (called "inhibition") by having a small molecule drugs that binds to a specific site of the protein (called the "allosteric site") in order to make it mechanically unable to execute its function. - Cyclin-dependent protein kinases (CDKs) are a family of proteins that seem to play important roles in controlling cell division. CDK20 is overexpressed in a number of cancers. Regarding the novelty: - Discovering new inhibitors of proteins based on AI is definitely less novel than it was 5 years ago - while it's definitely still not the norm, AI is making big waves in the pharmaceutical industry. However, I think this might be the first publication validating the use of Alphafold for small molecule drug development, which is a major step forward. - While it's interesting to see that it's possible to design a small-molecule CDK20 inhibitor, it's currently still very uncertain whether this is a promising drug: i. the compound could be insufficiently specific to CDK20 and could bind to other important proteins and cause unwanted and potentially serious side-effects, ii. the compound could have bad "drug-like" properties (e.g. bioaccumulate in the liver) or be toxic in some way, iii. the compound could interact badly with other drugs that cancer patients receive, iv. the compound could induce resistance (a common problem in small molecule drugs in oncology), and finally, and most importantly, v. the drug might just not be effective at treating cancer or any other diseases - it's not because a protein is over-expressed that it's the cause of a cancer, but rather a symptom of another biological dysregulation. Still, it's definitely an achievement, and I applaud the efforts of the team and hope they'll find successful treatments. |