<story><title>AlphaFold-Powered Drug Discovery of a Novel CDK20 Inhibitor</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.09647</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cing</author><text>I agree with the sentiment of this paper (AF can enable drug discovery), but in this specific instance, the authors had a real opportunity contribute a general finding to the scientific community but instead they put in the lowest amount of effort (to a point where they&amp;#x27;re almost saying nothing at all).&lt;p&gt;The target had dozens of related structures in the protein databank, including relatives with ~40% sequence identity. This target family has a very similar structure, and conserved active site residues. It&amp;#x27;s relevant that this target has approved cross-CDK family inhibitors (and thousands of data points of CDK family binders on ChEMBL). The conventional way to enable structure-based design is to build a homology model using a similar structure (see here: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;swissmodel.expasy.org&amp;#x2F;repository&amp;#x2F;uniprot&amp;#x2F;Q8IZL9?template=1v0o.1.A&amp;amp;range=3-290&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;swissmodel.expasy.org&amp;#x2F;repository&amp;#x2F;uniprot&amp;#x2F;Q8IZL9?temp...&lt;/a&gt;), and in this case, there is very low deviation from the AF2 model and this &amp;quot;old fashioned&amp;quot; approach.&lt;p&gt;To recap, this target had a decent model that would have likely sufficed for drug discovery. The community already knows that &amp;quot;homology models&amp;quot; can be used for structure-based drug design, so any methodological hypotheses of this paper are not supported by evidence.</text></comment>
<story><title>AlphaFold-Powered Drug Discovery of a Novel CDK20 Inhibitor</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.09647</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>civilized</author><text>Very cool.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s hard to read the tea leaves of the author affiliation list, but it sure looks like this work was led by a Hong Kong-based startup founded by Russians, with limited assistance from a couple North America-based researchers.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m curious why those Russians may have chosen to found in HK rather than, say, the Bay Area. We may want to contemplate what this means for America&amp;#x27;s competitive stance (not that I have any problem with the rest of the world doing awesome cutting edge research).</text></comment>