I agree with you on both counts. So, I concede, saving millions in research costs may be small beer. But I don’t see that invalidates the argument in my previous comment, which is about getting good drugs discovered as fast as is feasible. Achieving this will still have significant economic and humanitarian benefit even if they are no cheaper to develop. There are worthwhile drugs we have today that we wouldn’t have without Structure-Based Design.
The solving of the protein folding problem will also help us to design artificial enzymes and molecular machines. That won‘t be small potatoes either IMO.
Most of the money spent in developing drugs is not about finding targets but about running clinical studies to validate targets.
The time when structure-based drug design became possible did not coincide with drug development getting cheaper.
I agree with you on both counts. So, I concede, saving millions in research costs may be small beer. But I don’t see that invalidates the argument in my previous comment, which is about getting good drugs discovered as fast as is feasible. Achieving this will still have significant economic and humanitarian benefit even if they are no cheaper to develop. There are worthwhile drugs we have today that we wouldn’t have without Structure-Based Design.
The solving of the protein folding problem will also help us to design artificial enzymes and molecular machines. That won‘t be small potatoes either IMO.