Uncovering Bias in Protein Drug Targeting

Aug 8, 2023, 15:04 PM by Arnaud Legrand

Scientists have been working on discovering new drugs that can target specific proteins in our body. They use a method called "reactive cysteine profiling" to find potential drug targets. In this study, researchers at Imperial looked at all the proteins in our body to understand how this method works.

They found that certain types of drugs have a stronger effect on some proteins than others, leading to biases in the results. Also, the process of improving drugs further limits the number of proteins that can be targeted.

The researchers suggest that the current method only covers a small portion of potential drug targets and propose new ways to expand its coverage in the future. This research brings us closer to developing more effective and targeted treatments in the future. This discovery has been made publicly available to all researchers at https://tatelab.shinyapps.io/alpaca-db/.

Proteome-wide structural analysis identifies warhead- and coverage-specific biases in cysteine-focused chemoproteomics - Cell Chem Biol. 2023 Jul 20;30(7):828-838.e4.

Matthew E.H. White, Jesus Gil, Edward W. Tate