Scientists at MIPT, one of Russia’s leading tech universities in Moscow, have developed a method of simulating cellular membrane response to drug and toxin molecules, a way of analyzing drugs’ impact on human cells prior to administering the drugs, and studying ageing mechanisms without any experiments, portal Scientific Russia . An overview of the study was in Journal of Chemical Theory and Information.

The key advantage of the method is the ability of a researcher to identify and quantify all possible changes in a molecule and track the location of all atoms simultaneously, with each structure variant getting its specific value which could be used later on for statistical analysis. The developers processed data using the principal component method, a technique that enables the extraction of most essential data out of an ocean of all others.

Looking into lipids and studying single atoms is expected to help predict impact drugs and toxins may have on cells and the human body as a whole, thus stepping up the search of new pharmaceutical compositions and drug candidate tests considerably. In addition, the simulation can help study ageing mechanisms which some believe are closely linked to changes in cellular membrane structure.