Interested in finding a better way to develop drugs to treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Northeastern researcher Jeffrey Agar and a team of scientists came up with a technique that improves the drug discovery workflow for an entire class of pharmaceuticals.
“This could now become the gold standard for how covalent drugs are developed from now on,” says Agar, an associate professor of chemistry and pharmaceutical sciences.
The goal is to make the technique free and available to labs small and large, part of what Agar refers to as the “democratization of science.”
“We decided not to patent this,” he says. “Just take it, use it and make drugs safer.”
There’s been a scientific explosion of interest in covalent drugs since the discovery of the antiviral Paxlovid. Covalent drugs form permanent bonds with target proteins, which makes them longer lasting and potentially more potent than non-covalent drugs.
Some, like aspirin and penicillin, have been around for a while. But when it comes to a new generation of covalent drugs, limitations such as a large number of false positive “hits” during drug discovery and lack of methods to measure in vivo effect have slowed down the discovery process.
But Agar says he and a dozen colleagues — including Jared Auclair, Northeastern’s vice provost of Research Economic Development and director of Bioinnovation — have come up with a solution.
As described in Nature Portfolio, they developed a mathematical and bioanalytical model that uses mass spectrometry and protein analysis that allows researchers in even small labs to plug numbers into a “decision tree” to determine the potential efficacy of a drug under development.
