Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Nobel prize commitee recognize significance of Structure-based drug design

Structural biology has evolved considerably after the first breakthrough in understanding the molecular structure of DNA in 1950's. Nobel prize was awarded to them (Physiology/Medicine, 1962) for such an incredible discovery. This year's (2009) Nobel prize for chemistry goes to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath for their work on structural understanding of ribosomal machinery using X-ray crystallography. Nobel committee believe that this discovery is significant for the structure-based drug design of new antibiotics, especially since the emergence of bacterial resistance.
My thought here is "Will structure-based computational drug design methods bring some breakthrough discoveries in the next 20 years?"