AMBITO: Biologia, Medicina

The Plasmodium falciparum genome has been sequenced, the proteome has been mapped, and protein expression has been confirmed at various stages in this apicoplexan's life cycle. Numerous crystal structures of target proteins are also available, and the remainder have been modelled using available structural templates. Excitingly, large research organisations (GSK, Novartis) have already tested millions of compounds and found nearly 19,000 hits that show promising activity against Plasmodium falciparum [MMV]. But they don't know which target protein is inhibited by these compounds. Drug discovery and development will be significantly enhanced by knowing the target protein for each of these hits.

 

We plan to dock each of the 18,924 hits into structures of each of the 5,363 proteins in the malaria parasite. The computational power needed is enormous..