Paper detail

A remarkable emergent property of spontaneous (amino acid content) symmetry breaking

Learning how proteins fold will hardly have any impact in the way conventional -- active site centered -- drugs are designed. On the other hand, this knowledge is proving instrumental in defining a new paradigm for the identification of drugs against any target protein: folding inhibition. Targeting folding renders drugs less prone to elicit spontaneous genetic mutations which in many cases, notably in connection with viruses like the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), can block therapeutic action. From the progress which has taken place during the last years in the understanding of the becoming of a protein, and how to read from the corresponding sequences the associated three-dimensional, biologically active, native structure, the idea of non-conventional (folding) inhibitors and thus of leads to eventual drugs to fight disease, arguably, without creating resistance, emerges as a distinct possibility.