he second lecture in Bangalore was 'New Avenues to Health'. The lecture was co-sponsored by the Indian Institute of Science and its Director, Professor Balaram, introduced Dr. David Baltimore to the audience.
An excerpt from the talk:
"One of my favourite things that would absolutely revolutionize drug development is if we could figure out how to make drugs that bind to proteins in non-enzymatic sites... Lots of biology, as we have learnt particularly in cancer, is done by proteins touching each other, which change configuration as a consequence and the changed configuration has new properties that allows interaction with another protein downstream and so you get these proteins, I'm sure you've all seen textbooks full of pathways of little three-letter named proteins, that are all interacting with each other, touching each other. You can interfere with that touching process, if you could put a small drug in there, so that they can get togther, you could actually break these chains of signal transduction very nicely. Why aren't we doing that? The answer is, it is very hard to design a drug that binds to a surface rather than a cleft. But I don't think it's an impossible thing. I think we just need to learn how to do that and that I would say is one of the holy grails of modern day drug discovery."
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