New method for searching for drugs in billions of molecules
Published: Monday, Sep 2nd 2024, 11:22
Zurück zu Live Feed
Zurich researchers want to use a new process to discover new drugs. Within just a few weeks, billions of new molecules can be produced and tested for their effectiveness, as ETH Zurich announced on Monday.
Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) have further developed a process for producing and testing new molecules.
Researchers often find new active ingredients by sifting through large collections of chemical compounds. These collections are created by combining individual building blocks into as many molecular variants as possible. From all these combinations, the researchers finally fish out those that show the desired activity.
In order to be able to identify the individual active compounds in effect tests, the so-called DEL (DNA-encoded chemical libraries) method was developed at Harvard University a few years ago. For this method, a piece of DNA is attached to each molecule. This creates a unique DNA sequence for each combination of building blocks as a barcode that can be read.
Self-cleaning
However, the chemical linking of the building blocks works differently depending on the combination. The same code can encode both the complete molecule with all building blocks and shortened variants with only some of the building blocks. As a result, the DNA code loses its uniqueness.
The new method prevents these impurities by enabling washing cycles. All truncated molecules that are missing the last building block, for example, can be removed in one washing step. This means that researchers can now produce and test not just a few million, but billions of different substances in just a few weeks. It also allows larger molecules to be produced.
According to the researchers, this makes it possible to find active substances that could not be found using the previous method.
©Keystone/SDA
German 
English 
French 
Spanish 
Arabic