About
Protein-Protein Interactions (PPIs) are involved in most biological process and diseases. With a recently estimated number of 370,000 PPIs in humans, they constitute a large ‘reservoir’ for therapeutic development compared to ‘conventional’ drug targets. However, success rates in developing bioactive compounds for this class of targets remain particularly low. In this project, we are working in a collaborative environment between an industrial partner and academics to design a unique tool that will accelerate identification of bioactive molecules targeting protein-protein interfaces: a focused chemical library (˜10,000 compounds) dedicated to the inhibition of protein-protein interfaces. An important point to underline here is that, once validated, this original chemical library dedicated to PPIs will be made available to academic laboratories (especially to the French network of academic screening platforms, ‘GDR3056 ChemBioScreen’), biotech’s and pharmaceutical industries through MTA.
This multidisciplinary project is coordinated by Xavier Morelli at the CRCM in Marseille and with Olivier Sperandio as the scientific supervisor of the task of actually selecting the 10 000 compounds using chemoinformatics approaches.