The objectives of drug design

I'll open the post on drug design objectives with photos from a most enjoyable and informative visit to the Australian Synchrotron early in 2010 when I was helping with fragment library design at CSIRO.I’ve been meaning for ages to do a post like this and was finally goaded into action when I recently looked at two short videos from interviews with Sir Demis Hassabis, founder of Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, and one of the 2024 Nobel Chemistry Prize laureates. Predicting the 3D structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence is a capability that has been eagerly sought for a long time and, as we celebrate the award, we need to also recognize the remarkable foresight of those who launched the Protein Data Bank in 1971 with just seven X-ray crystal structures. We also need to recognize that protein structures are inherently flexible and subject to post translational modification such as glycosylation and phosphorylation. Furthermore, the crystal structure that has actually…