PROJECT #16498 RESEARCH FOR CANCER
FOLDING PERFORMANCE PROFILE

PROJECT SUMMARY

In drug discovery, particularly that of cancer, maximizing state exploration is a useful novel strategy – providing new protein states and conformations to point drug design methods at increases the likelihood that a potential binder and inhibitor may be found.

However, in many cases a new state that is "useful for design" (ie.

ones distinct enough to be worth targeting to identify novel drugs) require a lot of sampling or simulation.

Sometimes, even exascale computers like Folding@home are not enough! Adaptive methods are very powerful here, but have the drawback of requiring system knowledge, or having to guess which protein features are worth adaptively exploring on, which may not always turn out to be true.

Another promising strategy, explored in these projects, is to "Accelerate" the simulations.

By broadly applying "boosters" to the simulation, we effectively "flatten" the energy landscape of a protein's conformations, allowing the protein to visit states more easily than it normally would.

Alongside the ability to discover new states that we can seed simulations of, just like adaptive sampling simulations, these boosters have specific technical and physiclal properties that allow us to infer something about a new state's "accessibility" (ie where it exists on the landscape). In projects 16497–16499 we test three such boosters to accelerate our simulations to identify how well boosted simulations work for our purposes.

Here we apply it to the protein MET kinase, a protein drug target in many cancers such as non-small-cell lung carcinoma.

MET kinase is targeted by the drug crizotinib but often evolves resistance against the drug, rendering it ineffective.

With our boosted simulations we hope to observe never before seen states of MET!.

PROJECT INFO

Manager(s): Sukrit Singh

Institution: Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer-Center

Project URL: http://sukritsingh.github.io/

PROJECT WORK UNIT SUMMARY

Atoms: 59,897

Core: OPENMM_22

Status: Public