Thread by @foldingathome

Let’s talk about how simulating proteins with Folding@home fits into drug discovery and development.

[Thread] 1/11

First: what’s the difference between a vaccine and a drug? 2/11

For viruses, drugs can target proteins to prevent the virus from 1) infecting your cells, 2) replicating inside your cells, or 3) hiding from your immune system. Unfortunately it is not always clear where drugs can bind to a protein. 3/11

So how do protein simulations help discover drugs? Well our simulations help us see the protein move around. This can show us a lot of different places where a drug could bind or show us how to improve existing drugs! 4/11

The next step is to computationally and/or experimentally test a whole bunch of compounds to see what sticks to our protein and stops it from doing its job. 5/11

Then the drug needs to be optimized for things like 1) getting to the site of infection 2) killing the virus and, most importantly, 3) not killing the human cells. 6/11

The drug is then tested in animals before moving on to clinical trials. All the tests at this point are done to make sure that only the most effective and safest drugs are tested on humans. 7/11

Finally, the drug must go through clinical trials and receive approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This is a long process aimed at ensuring only the safest drugs are available for people to use. 8/11

However, the FDA does have procedures to speed up the process in situations like this. 9/11

fda.gov/emergency-prep…

Because this process is so long, being limited at the start from our inability to find good places for the drugs to bind is a big limitation to drug discovery. 10/11

That’s why F@h can be so useful! Through the donation of idle computer time, citizen-scientists are helping speed up the beginning steps of finding good drugs! 11/11