Dispatch from a Baylor Summer Fellow | Liam Liu

Something has been nagging at me recently. As we move towards creating more advanced drugs, I imagine a future where we develop a “drug” with no fixed shape. Instead, it changes shape based on the local environment in which it finds itself. It folds up in the stomach, takes on a different conformation in the brain, and assumes a third shape when it gets to an inflamed joint. This single molecule could, in theory, treat a host of diseases because it has learned to react in a specific way to whatever environment it finds itself in.

This could be “science fiction” in the future, but it is currently how I have been spending my summer. In my B-TRUE project, the hexapeptide WHWLQL changes conformation when it binds sodium or potassium ions. These two ions have very different concentrations in the body, i.e. high outside of cells and low inside of cells. This change in conformation could allow for a drug to have “multiple uses” since the drug itself would be able to change form to better fit the environment that it is in. However, WHWLQL is not going to be a drug, but instead the basic chemistry that rational drug design is based on. The fundamental research that is being done in labs all over the world, such as the conformation-sensing research that is currently in progress, will be the basis for future drugs. This is quietly researched for the community. However, in earlier reflections, I asked the question “research for whom?” and this keeps pulling at me.

Every time I refuse to report a rate constant without sufficient knowledge of the underlying mechanism, I am serving a purpose. Although it may seem like I am working in isolation, my data will be used by others, and I have a responsibility to report accurate numbers. This, in itself, is a form of service to the community. To answer the question of research for whom, I said before that my research is for the community, long before any patient benefits. But that was still a sort of indirect answer, because I didn’t really say for whom I was doing research. And I can answer that question now. The honest work of checking rates and accounting for every particular of a system is research for whoever needs the truth of it next. So long as I am at the bench, that whoever could be another scientist, working with the same data that I am. When I am a physician-scientist, it could be a patient. It could be me.

This is the most relevant connection that I have come across between my current research and my goals as a future physician-scientist. At the bench and in the clinic, the highest standard of a true scientist is to not be satisfied with plausible but incorrect answers. This is the greatest service to others, for it allows others to benefit from the knowledge gained through rigorous inquiry.