Folding Forum

I noticed on my folding window that the Bryostatin project claims:"Bryostatin is a marine natural product that shows promising and unique activity against several diseases (most notably, cancer, HIV/AIDS, and Alzheimer's)"
Is all of this still true?

Researchers have been looking into Bryostatin since the '70's when it showed activity against a type of cancer in tests screening for possible drugs to treat cancers. All of that statement is still considered true at this point, though some early phase clinical trials in treating cancers have not shown a good enough benefit to risk ratio to continue. Investigations still continue in relation to HIV and Alzheimers.

Work is also being done on synthesizing Byrostatins as it take about a ton of the type of bryozoan producing them to make one gram. Research is also being done on possible simpler analog drugs that would have the same activity, and possibly be more potent or have fewer side effects.

The short of it is that it will take years to adequately investigate the Bryostatins and possible analogs developed based on them. They may find a useful set of drugs through that research, but it is not possible to predict success yet.

lirva1 wrote:I noticed on my folding window that the Bryostatin project claims:"Bryostatin is a marine natural product that shows promising and unique activity against several diseases (most notably, cancer, HIV/AIDS, and Alzheimer's)"
Is all of this still true?

A few months too late but this may help if you can get through the gobbledygook ... the latest paper related to Bryostatin published from the Pande Group:
REDOR NMR Reveals Multiple Conformers for a Protein Kinase C Ligand in a Membrane Environment

There's no reference directly to the Folding@home projects, however I would assume coming from the Pande Lab, it's implied. Normally, the Folding@home community is acknowledged if it relates to the projects we work on, but lately I think this has been hit & miss (please correct me if I'm wrong).

@wuffy68

I agree.

It's always safe to assume papers published by the Pande Group were researched using FAH. The same is true for research papers published by the other Labs that are part of the Folding Consortium. (Dr. V. Pande created FAH and I believe all the other labs listed were created by folks that studied at Stanford under Dr. Pande.)

bruce wrote:@wuffy68
It's always safe to assume papers published by the Pande Group were researched using FAH. The same is true for research papers published by the other Labs that are part of the Folding Consortium

Thanks bruce, that helps. Just to clarify, it includes only papers published by the consortium that list "Pande VS" as a co-author, correct?

No, "Pande VS" is not required. He's generally the senior author for papers published by his students, but many of his former students have started their own labs at other Universities and would probably be the Sr author for papers by their students.

bruce wrote:No, "Pande VS" is not required. He's generally the senior author for papers published by his students, but many of his former students have started their own labs at other Universities and would probably be the Sr author for papers by their students.

Thanks. I think many folders, including myself, have been hesitant to share those works in the context of folding@home if they don't include mention Pande or Folding@home directly. Great to know!