How far away is something like this from an actual treatment? I assume its pretty far, but is it the sort of thing where you basically have to test to see if it works and is safe-ish? Or are a lot more steps involved?
What does promising in this context mean? Like is it the sort of thing that has a 50% chance of eventually being useful, or is it more like 1% chance?
Regardless exciting to see alphafold be useful!
Should this molecule be successful (Wich is highly unlikely, as most hit targets aren't) it will probably take an decade until this becomes an experimental treatment, and likely two or more until it becomes a standard treatment.
All in all, this isn't really big news at all, this is a very unexciting thing, and only gets views because it has AlphaFold in the title
(Caveat: it's been a few years since I worked in a remotely related area)
It would be interesting to see the Kd values for the other CDK family members, there's no mention at all of specificity in their paper.
To see how messed up things can get, take a look at Vioxx. I saw the entire life cycle of vioxx during my earlier career: from "we crystallized cox-1 and cox-2 and now we can make differential inhibitors that don't cause stomach bleeding" to clinical trials to the drug being taken off the market because the clinical trials failed to report serious problems.
So these days every time a person waves their hand and claims they solved a problem I ask what the direct and immediate effect on the actual problems will be and it also elicits an answer of "well, it's complicated... next we have to do <soandso> and <suchandsuch> before we can even put it in a human". genomics with all its claims for human health went through the same hype cycle. As did nanomedical diagnostics.
Personally I think AlphaFold proved its value from day one, by firmly establishing the knowledge (which had already been speculated) that everything you need to predict protein structures is a large enough collection of protein structures, a much larger collection of protein sequence relationships, and a collection of very savvy machine learning techniques to extract the maximum information from that to produce the most physically plausible model. It also showed that you could do all this without explicitly modelling the folding process itself, which is such a huge timesaver.
This paper isn't really even quantitative scientific evidence that the methodology of the paper is a good hit filtering method. The authors don't say much about the ranking of the non-hits.
It's a valuation booster moreso than a scientific milestone.
So maybe a few years until first Human trials if they are fast? Maybe up to a decade for full approval? As to the chance nobody can say. Too many factors go into that.
I was sketching the path this research has to go for the benefit of a lay reader, provided nothing show-stopping occurs. The small molecule they propose may actually go all the way to Human trials, even though there is a high probability it will not turn out to do something useful.
They already used it on some kind of CDK20 activity assay. Maybe they modify it somewhat, but the next step would be to find out what it does in some kind of cell culture? I'm not an expert in drug development or this specific cancer.