Mimicking natural evolution with ’promiscuous reactions’ to improve the diversity of drugs

A revolutionary new scientific method developed at the University of Leeds will improve the diversity of 'biologically active molecules', such as antibiotics and anti-cancer agents. The researchers, who report their findings online today , took their inspiration from evolution in nature. The research may uncover new pharmaceutical drugs that traditional methods would never have found. “Nature produces some amazing structures with really interesting biological activity, but the plant or animal did not design them. Instead the organisms gradually evolved both the chemical structures and the methods to produce them over millennia because they were of benefit. We wanted to capture the essence of this in our approach to discovering new drugs,” said George Karageorgis, a PhD student from the School of Chemistry and the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology at the University of Leeds, and first author of the study. The traditional method for discovering new drugs involves preparing new biologically active molecules by adjusting the chemical structure of an existing one slightly and analysing the results.