It has always been popular to start companies around families and subfamilies of targets, banking on the similarity among the receptors to speed drug discovery. But the idea largely hasn't panned out, in part because of the new target risk--sometimes they're not pharmaceutically relevant and sometimes they resist the available chemistries. That's why G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) have been so important: they're clearly relevant (many, perhaps most, blockbusters come from this class of receptor) and their unique structure makes them both relatively easy to hit with ligands and likely to do something when hit. But the same structural advantages turn into scientific disadvantages for researchers: they resist screening and other techniques of modern drug discovery. We explore some of the newest approaches to mining this rich vein of opportunity.
It has always been popular to start companies around related
groups of targets—subfamilies like serotonin receptors were
focusing points in the earlier decades of biotech, and later whole
families, like kinases and ion channels, when high-throughput
technologies seemed to make such ambitious plans possible.
Such business plans were based on two big assumptions. First, that protein families which have already yielded a number of...
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