The Buffalo News

UB NOBELIST AIDS DISEASE CONTROL WITH BREAKTHROUGH STUDY

Published on August 13, 1992
Author:    By HENRY L. DAVIS - News Medical Reporter
© The Buffalo News Inc.

In a breakthrough that could speed the development of drugs to treat high blood pressure, diabetes and AIDS, a University at Buffalo professor has used a new method to "solve" in a matter of hours the molecular structure of two mystery substances brought here from the Soviet Union.

This is the first time scientists have determined the

structures of unknown chemical compounds using the new technique. What makes the finding even more interesting is that the

chemical compounds are a mystery.

The foundation learned of them from visiting Soviet scientists and spent several years unsuccessfully trying to figure out their structure. All they know is that they may be related to a drug used to stop tissue rejection in transplant patients.

By determining the structure of complex proteins and other molecules, researchers say it may be possible to understand how living things work and to design specific drugs to control diseases, instead of developing drugs by trial and error.

Dr. Herbert A. Hauptman, president of the Medical Foundation of Buffalo, this week announced the breakthrough of his colleague, Dr. Russ Miller, at the American Crystallographic Association meeting in Pittsburgh.

Hauptman is co-winner of the 1985 Nobel Prize in chemistry and a UB professor of biophysics and computer science.

By cutting the time involved in the work and automating part of the process, the foundation scientists hope to spur a wide range of research into the stuff of which humans are made and the viruses that attack their bodies.

"If you know the structure of a drug, you can deliberately improve it, you can understand why it does what it does, and you can figure out if using it causes long-term problems," Miller said.

In March, the foundation's Research Institute won a $3 million, four-year federal grant that officials said may make it the key center worldwide for studying body composition and the effects of viruses.

The National Institutes of Health grant funds a program to examine ways to learn the structure of large, complex molecules containing hundreds of atoms -- especially proteins.
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