Illustration by Blair Kelly
What do medical researchers do all day? Until recently, some of them arduously and meticulously tried to match drug molecules with potential diseases they could help alleviate. But after long and costly work, they’d often realize a side effect, metabolic variations, or other complications ruling out a potential match. It was back to the drawing board.
Technology has come to the rescue, quite literally, in the form of a drug discovery tool created at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital called ceSAR. It helps sort molecules 48,000 times faster to pick the best matches, the team reported in the journal Science Advances.
Researchers use a massive database called the Library of Integrated Network-Based Cellular Signatures to show what happens inside cells when certain genes are turned off or when drugs are added. By comparing these data sets, they can find compounds that cause the same effects as blocking a specific gene. So ceSAR spots drugs that might act on the same biological pathway, helping scientists quickly identify promising treatments.
Researchers can generate results in less than minute using ceSAR, according to researchers, in comparison to running the equivalent of 75 desktop computers around the clock for three months.
The tool, made in collaboration with UC researchers, is part of a larger trend of finding new uses for drugs we already know about. “There’s a big interest in repurposing drugs,” says Andrew B. Herr, Ph.D., researcher in the division of immunobiology at Children’s who is also a professor of pediatrics at University of Cincinnati Medical School. Herr’s lab collaborated with Jarek Meller, Ph.D., on the project, and the two were joint senior authors on the publication. “We can take something that’s already been approved and use it in a new combination, or we can take an existing drug and change the concentration or its formulation.” Those approved drugs have already gone through the “gauntlet” of research to prove safety, he says.
The ceSAR tool is already available online to the science and medical community and has one U.S. patent already granted, with two more pending.