Battling infectious diseases with 3D structures

An international team of scientists, led by Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, has determined the 3-D atomic structure of more than 1,000 proteins that are potential drug and vaccine targets, to combat some of the world’s most dangerous emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. These experimentally determined structures have been deposited into the World-Wide Protein Data Bank, an archive supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and are freely available to the scientific community. The 3-D structures help expedite drug and vaccine research and advance the understanding of pathogens and organisms causing infectious disease. “Almost 50 percent of the structures that we have deposited in the Protein Data Bank are proteins that were requested by scientific investigators from around the world,” said Feinberg’s Wayne Anderson, PhD, director of the project. “The NIH has also requested us to work on proteins for potential drug targets or vaccine candidates for many diseases, such...