The Hindu : Study to design more disease-specific drugs

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jan 07, 2004

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Study to design more disease-specific drugs

By P. Sunderarajan

CHANDIGARH JAN. 6. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Germany are working towards the development of a new range of drugs that would be more effective in the treatment of a variety of diseases ranging from HIV/AIDS, cancer, asthma, and Parkinson's disease, to high blood pressure and obesity.

The study, which involved understanding the structure of proteins in the membranes of the cells, the primary building blocks of life forms, is expected to result in the development of drugs that would be targeted towards the diseases in a more specific manner than at present and thus provide for better treatment.

Speaking to reporters here today, the Nobel Laureate, Hartmut Michel, who is leading the study, said his team was studying as many as 70 membrane proteins. They expected to come out with the complete structure of at least one protein by 2006 and that the first-ever drug designed on the basis of the study would be available in the market eight years after.

Dr. Michel is here in connection with the 91st session of the Indian Science Congress held here since January 3.

He said the study had exciting potential as though even currently almost 80 per cent of the drugs worked by acting on membrane protein, they suffered from a disadvantage as the action was in a random fashion.

By enabling the development of drugs that were more targeted, it would help ensure that the treatment was more effective. So far, scientists across the world have been able to determine the structure of only three membrane proteins in human cells and two from other mammalian animals, while according to estimates, there are about a total of 10,000 of them in human cells.

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