3 ms·

I'm just an interested layman but it seems like this technology might be useful in developing therapies that either suppress or amplify immune response (e.g. di

by jcims 6y ago

I'm just an interested layman but it seems like this technology might be useful in developing therapies that either suppress or amplify immune response (e.g. diabetes, vaccines, cancer). For example, it may be possible to optimize the targeting of PD-1 inhibitors by comparing the PD-L1 ligands of healthy and diseased tissues in a cancer patient (edit: found something [2]). There was also a story [1] about how more advanced imaging was used to help identify antibodies that would be effective against SARS-CoV-2. [1] https://www.diagnosticimaging.com/view/role-emerges-imaging-covid-19-vaccine-development https://www.diagnosticimaging.com/view/role-emerges-imaging-... https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/novel-coronavirus-structure-reveals-targets-vaccines-treatments https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/novel-c... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5050107/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5050107/

natechols 6y ago
It's absolutely useful for drug development and pharma companies appear to be getting heavily invested in the technique. The problem is that they've been trying to use structural biology this way for close to four decades now, and there are still many obstacles to this that have nothing to do with the structural biology methods themselves. Biology is messy, human biology particularly so. There are success stories of course but it's never been a magical solution.
- jcims 6y ago
  Ah ok. That type of problem has to be orders of magnitude more difficult, especially when this still doesn't give us a great view into how everything interacts in a living creature.