Enlarge / The three-dimensional structures of proteins provide many opportunities for specific interactions. (credit: Getty Images)
Thanks in part to the large range of shapes they can adopt and the chemical environments those shapes create, proteins can perform an amazing number of functions. But there are many proteins we wish didn’t function quite so well, like the proteins on the surfaces of viruses that let them latch on to new cells or the damaged proteins that cause cancer cells to grow uncontrollably.
Ideally, we’d like to block the key sites on these proteins, limiting their ability to do harm. We’ve seen some progress in this area with the introduction of a number of small-molecule drugs, including one that appears effective against COVID-19. But that sort of drug development often results in chemicals that, for one reason or another, don’t make effective drugs.
Now, researchers have announced that they have created software that can design a separate protein that will stick to a target protein and potentially block its activity. The software has been carefully designed to minimize the processing demands of a computationally complex process, and the whole thing benefits from our ability to do large-scale validation tests using molecular biology.
