It looks like Circular Dichroism for SPR geeks.... ;-)
Hahahahaaaa....
Um, I think it's interesting from the standpoint that it can tell you a little more about how something binds to a receptor, and this information is very good for cell surface proteins(because its's damn hard to get a crystal or NMR structure).
But from a drug target/drug discovery point of view, for this to be widely accepted you would want to be able to apply it to generic, unknown, cell surface, druggable, target protein. I don't think that is easy, and I think most target guys would look at new cell surface proteins as being a tarbaby and pick a new target. I could be wrong of course!!!
Now for things that are known, like a select group of G proteins, it's kinna cool in that it can maybe tell the guy making the stuff whether or not he's getting some structure activity. However with that said, I find it hard to believe that one couldn't just look at downstream assays that might provide more information that would be just as useful.
In cell adhesion(inflammation), it would be kinna cool because it's believed that much of cell adhesion is due to a large number of really crappy interactions all lumping together to one big good one, and this would provide a way to model some of that supramolecular interaction, but again one wonders exactly what that tells the guy making the drugs. The point here is that there are a lot of people working on Sialyl Lewis X mimetics for the last 10 years and I haven't seen anything blazing through the clinic.
Oh yeah, since that was way toO technical.... I think you can take a look at a company called Biacore, and get an idea how well the future of this technology will go, since Biacore is the first generation(SPR)...
Anyway, enough rambling thoughts!!
Cheers. |
