Once we understand how a protein folds, we can start designing drugs to prevent it from misfolding. Computer simulations will be extremely helpful here, allowing us to greatly reduce the time and costs involved in therapeutic drug design. There’s also an exciting connection between biology and nanotechnology, and for decades it has been a dream to be able to rationally design drugs. We want to be able to create drugs like we create bridges. What I mean is you design a bridge and cars go over it and it works. Using this analogy for designing drugs, we first create a bridge, send some rats over it and if it they survive, we try humans who really want to cross the bridge. It is still very much empirical. The dream is to design molecules the way we design macroscopic objects. Sounds easy, but with everything so small you must be really, really accurate and that is very computationally demanding.
