I've been wondering, with these docking WUs and the idea of designing proteins that will achieve a dock with a diseased cell... is the idea just to get SOMEthing to dock, and the resulting shape change renders the disease unable to do it's damage? Or is the idea to dock and then deliver a drug or prevent the disease protein from replicating?

...and from there, it makes me wonder if it would be possible to immunize everyone against a marker, or a set of markers. And these would be added to designed proteins to attack a disease. That way, you'd create a docking agent that carries one of the markers that the patient is already immunized against, and their immune system already has the anitbodies required to take care of it!

To put it another way, I'm already immunized against Small Pox, Polio, and Chicken Pox... is there any way to design the docking protein such that my immune system would think that the cells the docking agent has combined with is Polio?

Just seems like this immunization ahead of time would be mankind's best bet against another epidemic of somekind. If the general population is already immunized, then it should help their natural immune system knock out the disease, once the docking agent is found that gives disease cells the proper appearance.

We must be getting close to the time where we will have a good idea what sort of marker "tail" will be possible to place on future docking agents.

---

Add this signature to your EMail:
Running Microsoft's "System Idle Process" will never help cure cancer, AIDS nor Alzheimer's. But running Rosetta@home just might!
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/