Rna Structure Prediction Is Hard. How Much Does That Matter?

oh yeah, I didn’t mean to say that they did claim that, that was just my (mis)conception

RNA structures are really more of a basic research thing. Having better tools there would be useful to understand these parts better. That's not irrelevant, but it doesn't lead directly to therapeutic applications.

RNAs so far have been very bad drug targets. That is to a large part inherent in their properties, they have fewer different components (4 bases compared to 20 amino acids) and the RNA backbone is strongly charged and interactions with something like that are generally unspecific. Odds are that RNA will remain a bad drug target for almost all cases.

I think it has very limited therapeutic applications with what we know about RNA structure today! But there's a great deal of completely unknown RNA biology (some of which I touch on in the essay) that may greatly benefit from RNA structure. The bit I mention about Arrakis Therapeutics preclinical work in drugging the (structured) RNA version of the MYC protein points to that being a very real possibility. All interesting biotech startups are built on bets on where the future is going, and I'm very happy that someone (AtomicAI and others) is betting on this, because clearly the answer of 'is RNA structure useful' isn't super open-and-shut

Fixed!