Using a library of 100,000 carefully designed molecules, scientists at Compugen’s subsidiary Keddem Bioscience are trying to create a “universal probe” that would act as a key for any enzyme’s active site, Martin Gerstel, the chairman of the board for Compugen, said on Monday during his presentation at the UBS Life Sciences conference in New York.

If such a probe is successful, it would solve the problem of finding inhibitors for proteins in order to study what the functions of specific proteins are, said Dror Ofer, the CEO of Keddem.