Experimental peptide targets Covid-19

Good news! This is only the beginning of using computer modeling to find new therapeutics for diseases!



"Using computational models of protein interactions, researchers at the MIT Media Lab and Center for Bits and Atoms have designed a peptide that can bind to coronavirus proteins and shuttle them into a cellular pathway that breaks them down. ... Their idea was to have their peptides recruit naturally occurring proteins called E3 ubiquitin ligases, which can mark proteins for destruction when cells no longer need them. ... [researchers] recently used similar computational methods to design improved versions of enzymes used for the genome-editing technique known as CRISPR. Their new CRISPR-Cas9 enzymes, together, can target more than 70 percent of DNA sequences, while the most commonly used form of CRISPR-Cas9 reaches only about 10 percent."



Experimental peptide targets Covid-19 | MIT News Computational modeling yields a protein fragment that could bind to coronavirus spike proteins and destroy them.