Title: Peptide Drug Concept

Description: This print was part of an exhibition in the President's Gallery titled "No Art : Art Show" and was donated to the permanent collection at the close of the show. The following description accompanied the image on a label:

Peptides offer enormous potential as drugs. Computational methods developed in the last ten years permit us to design peptides which can be chemically synthesized from mixtures of natural and artificial amino acid building-blocks, and which fold into conformations that are shaped perfectly to bind to pockets in target proteins. If the target protein is involved in human disease, and if the binding interferes with the function of that protein in some way, the peptide can potentially be used to treat that disease. Here, an early design for an anti-HIV peptide is shown in gold, bound to an HIV protein that the peptide is intended to inhibit.