Google Supercomputers Tackle Giant Drug-Interaction Data Crunch 50
ananyo writes "By analysing the chemical structure of a drug, researchers can see if it is likely to bind to, or 'dock' with, a biological target such as a protein. Researchers have now unveiled a computational effort that used Google's supercomputers to assesses billions of potential dockings on the basis of drug and protein information held in public databases. The effort will help researchers to find potentially toxic side effects and to predict how and where a compound might work in the body. 'It's the largest computational docking ever done by mankind,' says Timothy Cardozo, a pharmacologist at New York University's Langone Medical Center, who presented the project at the US National Institutes of Health's High Risk–High Reward Symposium in Bethesda, Maryland. The result, a website called Drugable, is still in testing, but it will eventually be available for free, allowing researchers to predict how and where a compound might work in the body, purely on the basis of chemical structure."
Re:The real important questions (Score:4, Informative)
I see nobody asked the real important questions.
Are they also checking if you can get high from a substance?
Is somebody going to leak that list?
No need to do that. The Federal Government has gone to great expense and trouble to compile this exhaustive list [usdoj.gov] of drugs that can get all the blinky lights in your brain going.