MOST drugs have side-effects. One reason is that they interact with proteins other than the one they are being aimed at to treat a particular disease. Viewed another way, however, this means some drugs can have more than one use if what is a side-effect of one treatment can be turned into the central effect of another. Existing medicines may thus be repurposed for new therapies, not only helping patients but also saving drug companies time and development money, since they do not have to retest the substances in question to show they are safe.They do, however, have to work out what other proteins the drug in question is interacting with, and that itself is a costly business. But it may soon get cheaper if a method proposed by Sivanesan Dakshanamurthy, a molecular biologist at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, turns out to work. For Dr Dakshanamurthy plans to do the first part of this testing inside a computer.Dr Dakshanamurthy’s initial study of the method, just published in Medicinal Chemistry, started from the observation that the shapes of most drug molecules—and particularly the…
