Ask HN: [bio] How does drug/enzyme matching work? (COVID-19)
I'm looking for people that understand the process of matching drugs (inhibitors) to known enzyme preferences . The context is this recent and highly current discovery for COVID-19: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.07.981928v1.full
The paper describes a profile of key enzymes enabling virus activity. Interestingly, these enzymes are not known to be present in humans meaning that disabling their activity would kill the virus without affecting humans' biology.
I listened to Marcin Drąg's (one of the authors) press conference yesterday where he said the most promising short-term path to put this discovery into work is searching for existing already approved drugs that might inhibit this enzyme. In other words: retarget an existing drug to work against COVID-19 which would have a tremendous medical and economic impact if worked.
Does anyone understand what are the key challenges in matching a drug to enzyme profile? I wonder if a small team of software people could help? I've read a bit about people using deep learning approaches for both discovering and matching drugs but I lack domain specific knowledge to understand if it's relevant here.
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