Last year we
highlighted the secretive juggernaut DREADCO's move into drug discovery. Today
they announced the launch of their new division SkyFragNet (not to be confused
with the European graduate training program FragNet). Its audacious mission: “to
eradicate human disease."
SkyFragNet
will automate every aspect of drug discovery. The approach starts with a
powerful docking method, in which all 166 billion members of GDB-17 will be
docked against a target of interest. Synthetic schemes for the virtual hits
will be computationally generated, and the compounds will be synthesized using
automated flow synthesis and mass-directed purification.
Fragment hits
that confirm in a panel of biophysical techniques will then undergo
computational-based growing; SkyFragNet incorporates the latest AI algorithms
to maximize the likelihood of success. As with the fragments, designed
molecules will be synthesized and tested, first in biochemical and then in
cell-based assays.
Although the
folks at Mordor State College are trying to make animal testing obsolete, SkyFragNet
will still rely on pharmaokinetic and pharmacodynamic studies. However, they
have built a fully mechanized vivarium run entirely by robots - think of The Matrix but with mice in place of
humans.
Finally,
compounds that make it through this gauntlet will be scaled up under GMP
conditions (automated, of course) for clinical trials. It remains to be seen
how many compounds SkyFragNet will take into the clinic, or whether the success
rates will be higher than those of their human counterparts.
Of course,
with all this power comes enormous responsibility. If things go wrong, hopefully
DREADCO will have the wisdom to Terminate the program. Eradicating
human disease could be done in two very different ways.
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4 comments:
That time of year
The key insight is that a successful drug is one that reduces the number of patients suffering from the symptoms.
Even though I understand Dan's fidelity to the tradition of making posts of this kind at this day of year, the situation described certainly doesn't sound as science fiction or utopia in the long run.
The times may come, when a process chemist/medicinal chemist/biologist etc. would be none other than a technician, under an unblinking eye of whom the job is being done by the highly automated machinery (this includes decision making as well), guided by computer vision in different spectral ranges and supported by databases giving access to all trial and error experience amassed by humankind.
The job of drug discovery will be done in the aforementioned way during the transition period, until disease as a conception is eradicated by artificial elimination of defective genes and mending the undesired mutation will become a matter of a single visit of a drug store.
Pete - that's brilliant - perhaps DREADCO will adopt it as their marketing slogan!
U. - My April 1 posts are often only partially in jest, and some of them turn out to be disturbingly accurate.
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