About

LUNE visits Will Roger’s state park, March 2022.

LUNE team dinner, August 2022.

LUNE visits Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook, July 2022.

LUNE visits Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook, July 2022.

The Lab for the Understanding of Network Effects (LUNE) aims to model drug effects. Drugs are traditionally developed to alter the function of proteins within cells – usually proteins that are malfunctioning and have causal relationships to disease. However, proteins in the cell exist in large, complex networks – they interact with each other and rarely exist in isolation. Even well designed drugs that alter the function of a target protein have ripple effects through protein networks. It’s widely appreciated that drug effects propagate through protein networks, but the downstream effects are not routinely considered during target protein selection. We are building protein network models to first understand the downstream effects of current drugs with the aim of later designing models to rationally select new protein targets with their downstream consequences in mind.