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AlphaFold-Powered Drug Discovery of a Novel CDK20 Inhibitor

arxiv.org

1–10 of 72 posts

Re: AlphaFold-Powered Drug Discovery of a Novel CDK20 Inhibitor

#3
Can someone explain for people who aren't good at biology what are the implications of this "novel CDK inhibitor"? Is this news only because of the discovery method (i.e. AI-based), or is it significant news in and of itself (i.e. this novel CDK20 inhibitor is/could be a big deal)?

Re: AlphaFold-Powered Drug Discovery of a Novel CDK20 Inhibitor

#4
post #3

Can someone explain for people who aren't good at biology what are the implications of this "novel CDK inhibitor"? Is this news only because of the discovery method (i.e. AI-based), or is it significant news in and of itself (i.e. this novel CDK20 inhibitor is/could be a big deal)?

CDK inhibitors play a role in cancer therapy.

Re: AlphaFold-Powered Drug Discovery of a Novel CDK20 Inhibitor

#5
post #3

Can someone explain for people who aren't good at biology what are the implications of this "novel CDK inhibitor"? Is this news only because of the discovery method (i.e. AI-based), or is it significant news in and of itself (i.e. this novel CDK20 inhibitor is/could be a big deal)?

I think this is explained pretty well in the paper:

"...hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) was nominated as the indication of interest due to its high prevalence in liver cancers and lack of effective treatments. In general, by analysis of text and OMICs data from 10 database for hepatocellular carcinoma, PandaOmics provides a top list of 20 targets after multiple dimensions filtration, including novelty, accessibility by biologics, safety, small molecule accessibility, and tissue specificity. CDK20 was finally selected as our initial target to work on due to its strong disease association, limited experimental structure information and with no publicly small molecule inhibitor. [...] To the best of our knowledge, this molecule is the first reported CDK20 inhibitor and moreover, this work is also the first reported example which successfully utilized AlphaFold predicted protein structures to identify a confirmed hit for a novel target in early drug discovery"

Re: AlphaFold-Powered Drug Discovery of a Novel CDK20 Inhibitor

#6
post #3

Can someone explain for people who aren't good at biology what are the implications of this "novel CDK inhibitor"? Is this news only because of the discovery method (i.e. AI-based), or is it significant news in and of itself (i.e. this novel CDK20 inhibitor is/could be a big deal)?

Finding a molecule that inhibits the use of the gene CDK20 could potentially help to stop certain cancers/tumors to grow and maybe even stop them to circumvent certain parts of the immune system

Re: AlphaFold-Powered Drug Discovery of a Novel CDK20 Inhibitor

#7
post #3

Can someone explain for people who aren't good at biology what are the implications of this "novel CDK inhibitor"? Is this news only because of the discovery method (i.e. AI-based), or is it significant news in and of itself (i.e. this novel CDK20 inhibitor is/could be a big deal)?

I have zero understanding of biology but apparently "Diseases associated with CDK20 include Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder".

https://www.genecards.org/cgi-bin/carddisp.pl?gene=CDK20

Re: AlphaFold-Powered Drug Discovery of a Novel CDK20 Inhibitor

#8
post #4
post #3

Can someone explain for people who aren't good at biology what are the implications of this "novel CDK inhibitor"? Is this news only because of the discovery method (i.e. AI-based), or is it significant news in and of itself (i.e. this novel CDK20 inhibitor is/could be a big deal)?

CDK inhibitors play a role in cancer therapy.

Would a greater amount of nonspecific cancer funding have allowed this specific discovery to be found faster since it is limited by a machine and human evaluation of the results?

Re: AlphaFold-Powered Drug Discovery of a Novel CDK20 Inhibitor

#9
This could be an interesting addition to other large scale drug discovery methods. Not totally sure how orthogonal it is to other methods and about the price point when use at scale - but nevertheless.

I suppose the critical issue will be still that going from molecule to treatment, the success rate is annoyingly low. (And, yes, there are lots of attempts to increase the odds here.)

Re: AlphaFold-Powered Drug Discovery of a Novel CDK20 Inhibitor

#10
For people who know about this area:

How far away is something like this from an actual treatment? I assume its pretty far, but is it the sort of thing where you basically have to test to see if it works and is safe-ish? Or are a lot more steps involved?

What does promising in this context mean? Like is it the sort of thing that has a 50% chance of eventually being useful, or is it more like 1% chance?

Regardless exciting to see alphafold be useful!

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