Prof Coveney was invited to present his new research on the future of patient-specific drug selection at the recent annual meeting of AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), the world's largest general scientific society.
Prof Peter Coveney and colleagues from University College London and Rutgers University simulated the shape of a key protein involved in HIV infection in an individual patient and then ranked the drug molecules most likely to block the activity.
In the future, it is expected that patient-specific drug selection will become routine. Researchers now recognise that pharmaceutical products do not have the same effects in all people. Subtle genetic differences between individuals will lead to a range of outcomes.
"We show that it's possible to take a genomic sequence from a patient; use that to build the accurate, patient-specific, three-dimensional structure of the patient's protein; and then match that protein to the best drug available from a set. In other words, to rank those drugs - to be able to say to a doctor 'this drug is the one that's going to bind most efficiently to that site. The other ones, less so'." say Prof Coveney.
The research was reported at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and it was featured on a recent article by BBC News.