this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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also note that the big failures come from faulty biology, not from faulty chemistry. You can set innumerable piles of cash on fire if you choose to plug a wrong enzyme
elaborating on that. when you can hit a protein cleanly (without some side effects (called off-target, there are also on-target side effects)) but you hit wrong protein, this doesn't have to be a complete loss, but it's likely. maybe you learn something, either about biology of that all or about something else that it interacts with, or maybe you have found a cure to some other disease instead. but this is the actual hard problem of drug development, especially when the biology of it all is little known. there's a few of these drugs that started this way, fentanyl, viagra, thalidomide (as anticancer), minoxidil come to mind, and at worst you have a new tool for biologists. alphafold won't help with that