Cryo-EM in Drug Discovery

Over the past few years, cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has positioned itself as an invaluable tool for the pharmaceutical industry. Numerous advancements increased the efficiency, ease-of-use, and throughput of the workflow, allowing structural biology to support the study of previously intractable biological targets. Structural insights are now being seen on membrane proteins (60% of drug targets) and large macromolecular complexes, that were not suitable for traditional techniques such as X-ray crystallography (XRD) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. Cryo-EM can accelerate structure-based drug design by providing a broader picture of how proteins function, revealing binding sites, conformations, and assisting with hit finding.