Understanding And Combating Mutations In Genetic Disease And Drug Resistance: Different Challenges But Common Solutions
Sir Tom Blundell,
Professor,
University of Cambridge
Knowledge from sequences of genomes of humans and pathogens has the potential to accelerate diagnosis, prognosis and cure of disease. We are moving quickly into an era of precision medicine, not only in familial diseases where a mutation in a human gene is important, but also for multigene diseases like diabetes and cancer. Equally important, the genome sequences sequences of tumours and of pathogens, for example Mycobacterium tuberculosis, can give clues about the choice of existing drugs, repurposing of others, and the design of new ones to combat the increasing occurrence of drug resistance. I will describe new statistical potentials (SDM) and machine learning methods (mCSM) that can identify mechanisms by which mutations impact on human health and the use of medicines in both genetic disease and drug resistance. I will discuss high-throughput computational, biophysical and structural analyses can be used to investigate the targets that drugs might bind and structure-guided, small molecule-screening approaches to the design of new medicines.
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