Issue 6604 of Nature (7 November 1996) has a supplement entitled
"Intelligent drug design". This is quite interesting and well done as
far as it goes, but the entire supplement appears not contain the words
"metabolism" or "metabolic", and appears to display no recognition of
the fact that what cells do is metabolism and that what drugs are
supposed to do is to alter metabolism. (What it does contain, of course,
is the usual stuff about how a combination of genetic engineering,
structural biology and bioinformatics will make drug design a far more
successful and rational business than it has been hitherto.) I suppose
the basic assumption is that once you find the sought-after competitive
inhibitor of the key enzyme and find a way of delivering it to the
target cell its effects in vivo are so obvious that they don't need to
be thought about in advance. Do readers of this News Group find this as
astonishing as I do? Does it matter? If it does, what can be done about
it?
Regards,
Athel
