Institut Pasteur Boosts Drug Development

Profiles in Success: Institut Pasteur

Drug development in science institutions across the world are benefiting from Apple’s support for the Institut Pasteur in Paris. The Institut is using Apple technology to help its unique work in modelling the biological movement of macromolecules, making them available online to the global science community to aid better understanding of illness and more precise drug design.

The Apple Research & Technology Support (ARTS) programme provides the server and desktop hardware to power the computational activity required, and generate high-quality graphics for visualising the models on a dedicated Web site.

“The problem with a lot of drug design today is that it focuses on the known structural states of macromolecules”, says Dr Marc Delarue, Head of the Unit of Structural Dynamics of Macromolecules at the Institut Pasteur.

“Yet each of the intermediate states assumed by the molecule in the so-called transition path that links the known stable states could provide a good drug design target. So our work in studying and presenting these transition paths could be crucial to better drug development. We need Apple’s help to manage the demand from the global science community, and to deliver quality visualisation”.

The Institut Pasteur is a non-profit private foundation, which contributes to the prevention and treatment of disease through research, education and public health activities. Based in Paris, and formed 120 years ago, the Institut represents an independent international network of 2,500 scientists — the only one of its kind in the world.

The Unit of Structural Dynamics of Macromolecules at the Institut is a leader in studying the structural dynamics of proteins and macromolecules. Key to its work is understanding how they move and change during their biological activity, because of the importance of those transition stages to the development of new drugs.

“A major problem in structural molecular biology is to understand and predict large molecular movements in enzymes”, says Dr Delarue. “Experimental methods such as X-Ray crystallography help describe some of the states of movement, but we have developed and implemented a new method — through a collaboration with Stanford University, Reed College and UC Davis — to simulate the transition path in the same molecule using computation. The method has been tested on a number of known structural transitions and it gives results superior to those of other methods“.

The results can be visualised as movies, describing the most probable trajectory in the development of a macromolecule as it moves from one state to another. In line with the Institut’s objectives, Dr Delarue and his colleagues are committed to providing the results of the Unit’s work to scientists and researchers all over the world.

“There is great interest in knowing the structural characteristics of these transition states”, Dr Delarue says. “If you can understand them, maybe you can manipulate some enzymes to do something else – that’s bio-engineering. Maybe you can develop drugs that will block the reaction at any given state along the structural transition occurring during the catalytic cycle”.

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