Empowered Patient Podcast Using AI in Drug Development to Protect Brain Enzyme Linked to Parkinson’s Disease Progression with Gene Mack Gain Therapeutics
Gene Mack, CEO and President of Gain Therapeutics, is combining AI-powered drug discovery with the development of allosteric modulators, drugs that bind to unique sites on proteins. The company's AI platform, Magellan, is crucial for accelerating drug discovery by reducing the time for computational screening of potential drug compounds. Their lead compound is showing promising results as a potential disease-modifying therapy for Parkinson's disease, aiming to halt the progression of the disease rather than just treating symptoms.
Gene explains, "So allosteric modulators of protein, it's a bit of a word salad, but what we're trying to achieve here is finding unique binding sites on proteins that are sort of away from the active site of that protein."
"So, a lot of physics calculations go into these binding site calculations. The idea is to complete these quickly during the screening of hundreds or thousands of compounds. This process takes 10 to 15 minutes to run a set of computations and determine if a particular molecule is a fit for a specific protein. If that takes 10 or 15 minutes per compound, it's not a very big deal to go to that library if you need to get through billions, trillions of those compounds, and you need that computational speed to really fire up."
"We are able to speed up those calculations from, let's say, 10 minutes to milliseconds. You can screen through much larger numbers of compounds and potentially even construct new molecules that are not known to the public domain, which would be a real key innovation."
"What we think we have in our lead program, which is GT-02287, another molecule that was discovered through our application of Magellan. What we hope we have in GT-02287 is a disease-modifying approach to Parkinson's. Up until now, the only available treatments for Parkinson's are really just focused on the symptoms and allaying the severity of the symptoms."
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