New Study Reveals Drugs with Fewer Side Effects

The problem of side effects can now be a thing of past as scientists have come up with a way to produce drugs with fewer side effects. This could become possible with the help of cutting edge computer ling to learn how the body reacts to different drug treatments.

The group of researchers from Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences did an investigation to alternative drug recognition sites on G protein couples receptors (GPCRs). This is the largest and most important family of receptors proteins in the human body.

It has been found that GPCRs play a crucial role in virtually every biological process and also most diseases; this includes neuropsychiatric disorders, cardiovascular disease, obesity and diabetes, inflammation and cancer. This new research looks into how the GPCRs work at the molecular level and how it has unlocked vital insights into how the drugs react with this therapeutically relevant receptor family.

Professor Arthur Christopoulos who worked on the research said that "This study has cracked the secret of how a new class of drug molecule, which we have been studying for some time now, actually binds to a GPCR and changes the protein's structure to achieve its unique molecular effect. This research can explain the behaviour of such drugs at the molecular level and facilitate structure-based design for new and more potent drugs.”

The predictions made by the computer simulations were validated by new biological experiments and by the rational design of a more potent molecule that targets the GPCR.

The study was published in the journal Nature.

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