How Many Protein-Protein Interfaces Have Been Regarded As Putative Targets?

Question

[miquelduranfrigola]

Hi all,

every now and then I read that protein-protein interfaces (PPInt) constitute a promising reservoir of putative drug targets. The common message is that, although arguably difficult to target, these will revolutionize pharmacology in that they will address pharmacological actions that are different from the common ones (receptors, kinases, ion channels...), thereby leading to new therapies for complex diseases.

I wonder if someone (paper, database, etc) has quantified this. I know that few PPInts have been inhibited so far (TIMBAL and 2P2Idb), but I would better like to have an idea on the number of PPIs that have been regarded as putative targets, although possibly not yet successfully inhibited.

Thanks a lot!

Miquel

Answer 1

[cdsouthan]

Applying the adjective "putative" to drug targets is, in a classification sense, not much use and can not be used as a clean database tag. The patent corpus however is a de facto putative target ensemble. The problem you are faced with here is that mining this for PPInts with usable specificity would be very difficult. Advanced text mining could be worth a try though.