{"id":3480,"date":"2025-10-27T10:37:55","date_gmt":"2025-10-27T14:37:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bc362\/?p=3480"},"modified":"2025-10-27T10:39:14","modified_gmt":"2025-10-27T14:39:14","slug":"reflection-1-rational-drug-design-protein-structure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bc362\/2025\/10\/27\/reflection-1-rational-drug-design-protein-structure\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflection 1 – Rational Drug Design & Protein Structure"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was first introduced to biology, I was captivated by it as the science of life<\/em>. A younger version of myself could imagine nothing more essential to combating death and disease than understanding the central dogma and the complex choreography of proteins within and beyond a cell. Lately, my exposure to biochemistry has completely reshaped that view. I’m learning that simply grasping the organization and function of a wide array of cells and organelles isn’t enough. Within every cellular process exists a world of physical and chemical principles, and it’s an understanding of those molecular details that imbues one with the power to both understand and manipulate life itself. A key example of this we’ve explicitly gone over in class is the concept of rational drug design and the importance of understanding protein structure.<\/p>\n

Take for example, our discussion of enzyme inhibitors. Imatinib is a drug that essentially revolutionized treatment for chronic myeloid leukemia. Drugs like Imatinib aren’t discovered through coincidence (as might be the approach of serendipitously discovering that a certain compound is upregulated within a disease, and working back\"\"<\/a>wards to design an agent that downregulates its expression). Scientists studied the 3D structure of the BCR-ABL protein and were able to design a drug that lodges itself in the ATP-binding pocket of the ABL kinase domain, locking it in its inactive conformation. This work, a product of a concrete biochemical understanding of disease, has been key in boosting overall 10-year survival rate for CML patients by more than 80%.<\/p>\n

As someone with a wide variety of interests within the of biology who strives to make a foundational impact in an underexplored terrain, it’s clear that there is no field more fundamental than Biochemistry, the very field that ties it all together.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was first introduced to biology, I was captivated by it as the science of life. A younger version of myself could imagine nothing more essential to combating death and disease than understanding the central dogma and the complex … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17632,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[349081],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bc362\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3480"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bc362\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bc362\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bc362\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17632"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bc362\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3480"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bc362\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3482,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bc362\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3480\/revisions\/3482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bc362\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bc362\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bc362\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}