While it's nice from a technical perspective, this is unlikely to lead to a cancer cure. Having worked in cancer drug development, I can tell you, there is no shortage of cancer targets. Researchers have a list of targets they want to hit, and chemists are pretty darn good at designing small molecule compounds to hit them.
The problem in cancer is not that we don't understand individual proteins or the way that drugs bind to them (the problem being solved in this article). It is that the biology of cancer is a crazy web of highly complex interactions and feedback loops of which we have a pathetically rudimentary understanding. So even when you think you're hitting a target that should kill the cancer, you find out there's some side pathway that spools up and limits the drug's efficacy (or worse, the cancer cells actively pump your compound out). If I recall, something like >95% of new cancer therapies fail in clinical trials. Most of the failure in this drug category is due to lack of efficacy (even though they hit a target, they don't do jack for treating the cancer). If you could make that number 85%, you'd probably be a Nobel contender.
Unfortunately, there's no digital route here. What needs to be done is a lot of slow, messy "wet bench" biology. There is no electronic shortcut to understanding how living cells work.
The problem in cancer is not that we don't understand individual proteins or the way that drugs bind to them (the problem being solved in this article). It is that the biology of cancer is a crazy web of highly complex interactions and feedback loops of which we have a pathetically rudimentary understanding. So even when you think you're hitting a target that should kill the cancer, you find out there's some side pathway that spools up and limits the drug's efficacy (or worse, the cancer cells actively pump your compound out). If I recall, something like >95% of new cancer therapies fail in clinical trials. Most of the failure in this drug category is due to lack of efficacy (even though they hit a target, they don't do jack for treating the cancer). If you could make that number 85%, you'd probably be a Nobel contender.
Unfortunately, there's no digital route here. What needs to be done is a lot of slow, messy "wet bench" biology. There is no electronic shortcut to understanding how living cells work.