A New Technology for the Design of Effective and Safe Anti-Breast Cancer Drugs

Description of the project

This project is focused on the application of a new technology (Speck technology) for the design of safe anti-breast cancer chemicals. In order to accomplish this purpose, all the chemical and biological data will be extracted from the free online source known as CHEMBL database. After, a series of computer simulations will be performed, and from them, computational models will be obtained. Such models will be able to predict anti-breast cancer activity, toxicity, and other properties of the chemicals. Subsequently, a series of fragments (pieces of chemicals) will be extracted and ranked according to their intrinsic (physicochemical) properties. Then, the “puzzle approach” will be applied; the best fragments will be assembled as pieces of a puzzle in order to create new chemicals with improved anti-breast cancer activity, low toxicity, etc. These chemicals designed by using the Speck technology will undergo experimental validation. In that way, pharmaceutical companies will be able to benefit from the result of the Speck technology, and the discovery of more effective and safer anti-breast cancer drugs will be accelerated. Thus more lives will be saved.

Risks and Challenges

There are two main risks that come with completing this project:

The first risk is the time associated with the experimental validation. This task will be performed by specialized companies, and it constitutes the prime reason for the fundraising in this project. Depending on the number of tests, the experimental validation can take 3-5 months, but it can be delayed by other factors that escape my control such as the volume of experiments that the specialized companies need to perform for other clients.

The results of the Speck technology will be published in a prestigious international journal, and they will be made available free of charge to the public. Therefore, the second risk is the time associated with the review process that each scientific article must undergo. In this context, the article will be sent to a very prestigious international journal, and it will be revised by the journal editor for a first assessment. After that, the journal editor will send the article for further revision to external reviewers (experts whose fields of research are similar or related to the content of the article). These reviewers will suggest a series of modifications that should be made in order to improve the quality of the article. After, I will make the appropriate corrections, and I will send the reviewed version of the article to the journal editor, who will decide based on my corrections whether to accept or reject the article for publication in the journal. With the acceptance of the article, the article proof will be created by the journal editorial team, and I will have the chance to correct any error that could occur during the process of editing the article. After that, the journal will schedule a data when my article will be published. The whole process may take 4 months. However, delays can occur due to the change in the internal rules of the journal for publication of the articles or the breach of deadlines for delivery of review reports made by reviewers.

I have 9 years of experience in science, and I am confident that taking into consideration the deadline to deliver the results of the project (December 2018), the best way to prevent the effect of the aforementioned risks is to expedite the first stage of the project, which is the part focused on extracting chemical and biological data and performing computational simulations. I am already working on the extraction of all data, which are being curated (corrected in order to avoid potential errors). By the time the funding will be received, all the data will be ready to perform computational simulations which may take around 4 months.

Most of the money in this project is for experimental validation, and there is a percentage that includes fees. I would like to say that if I receive more funding than expected, the extra funding will be employed to buy equipment and accelerate the computational simulations. As you can see, I am not asking for any money for my work, which is a very important part of the project. I decided to volunteer to do this work in order to accelerate the drug discovery process and save more lives.