Cover Article in Chemical & Engineering News Features Structure-Based Drug Design

Summary

The June 4 issue of Chemical & Engineering News, published by the American Chemical Society, has a feature article on structure-based drug design. The article emphasizes the importance of the Department of Energy synchrotron light sources to the effort to design candidate pharmaceuticals using structural information on large molecules. Structures are needed not only of the target proteins but also of complexes between the proteins and potential drugs. Structures obtained by x-ray crystallography, as well as nuclear magnetic resonance and mass spectrometry, also serve as input into computational structure modeling. Two of the companies whose research efforts are featured in the article, Syrrx and Structural Genomix, participate in dedicated synchrotron beam lines for high throughput crystallography, at the Advanced Light Source at the Berkeley Lab and the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory, respectively.