Drug discovery is a long and expensive process, and any technologies that can speed up how drugs are created has great potential to improve medicine overall.
Scientists at Bristol University in the UK, Interactive Scientific, a spinoff of the university, and Oracle Corporation, have worked together to develop a virtual reality simulator that can be used to assemble new molecules and test how they interact with other molecules. The system was made to run on the Oracle cloud, allowing multiple people in different locations to interact together, manipulating molecules and sticking them together to see what happens.
Some of the possible manipulations include pushing a molecule through a nanotube, flipping a helical organic molecule to screw in the opposite direction, and tying proteins into knots.
Here’s a short video demonstrating the technology, followed by a link to download the software to your computer:
Try out the software for yourself: Nano Simbox iMD…
Study in Science Advances: Sampling molecular conformations and dynamics in a multiuser virtual reality framework…