Crystallization Of Challenging Pharmaceutical Targets To Aid Drug Discovery

By Mary Koszelak-Rosenblum, PhD, Senior Research Scientist, Curia, and Guangyu Zhu, PhD, Senior Research Scientist, Curia

X-ray crystallography is the major structural biology method used in drug discovery research. It allows an analysis of the ways a potential drug interacts with its protein target and allows new drugs to be designed. Compared with other structural biology methods, crystallizing the target protein remains challenging and, in most cases, is still the bottleneck step in the entire process of X-ray crystallography.

This paper focuses on a few successful strategies used when growing crystals of challenging pharmaceutical targets to aid drug discovery. Included are two case studies performed by our experienced team of crystallographers at Curia.