Ground-breaking approach accelerates drug discovery process

An international collaboration between Imperial College London, Singapore's Duke-NUS Medical School and Belgium-based pharmaceutical company UCB led to the discovery of a new anti-epileptic drug target and a whole new approach that promises to speed up the discovery of future drugs to treat debilitating diseases, such as epilepsy. Led by Prof. Michael Johnson, Division of Brain Sciences, Imperial College London, UK; A/Prof. Enrico Petretto, Centre for Computational Biology, Duke-NUS Medical School; and Dr. Rafal Kaminski, UCB, Belgium, this collaboration developed an advanced computational approach to predict new drug targets. As a proof-of-concept, the investigators applied their computational approach to epilepsy resulting in the discovery of a new drug target for the disease that was experimentally confirmed by showing that pharmacological blockade of the target had anti-seizure effects in pre-clinical models.