ArticleNature communications2025
Drugit: crowd-sourcing molecular design of non-peptidic VHL binders.
Article in Nature communications, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- CACHE Challenge #3: Targeting the Nsp3 Macrodomain of SARS-CoV-2.Journal of chemical information and modeling · 2026Article
- CACHE Challenge #2: Targeting the RNA Site of the SARS-CoV-2 Helicase Nsp13.Journal of chemical information and modeling · 2025Article
- Smart distributed data factory volunteer computing platform for active learning-driven molecular data acquisition.Scientific reports · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
26 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Building on the role of human intuition in small molecule drug design, we explored whether crowdsourcing could recruit citizen scientists to this task while in parallel building awareness for this scientific process. Here, we introduce Drugit ( https://drugit.org ), the small molecule design mode of the online citizen science game Foldit. We demonstrate its utility by identifying distinct binders to the von Hippel Lindau E3 ligase. Several thousand molecules were suggested by players in a series of ten puzzle rounds. The proposed molecules were further evaluated in silico and manually by an expert panel. Selected candidates were synthesized and tested. One of these molecules shows dose-dependent shift perturbations in protein-observed NMR experiments. The co-crystal structure in complex with the E3 ligase reveals that the observed binding mode matches the player's original idea. The completion of one full design cycle is a proof of concept for the Drugit approach and highlights the potential of involving citizen scientists in early drug discovery.
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