Apologies if this is super naive — I’m a student trying to figure out whether experimental protein structure research is worth pursuing, especially for cancer.

If we could rapidly and cheaply determine experimental structures for any protein (including cancer mutations), would that enable something like:

• protein mutation appears → structure solved quickly → new drug designed → repeat cycle?

Or is protein structure not the main bottleneck? If not, what actually is — difficulty of designing effective drugs even with perfect structures, delivery into tumors, or something else?

I’m also worried about timelines: by the time we can cheaply determine structures at scale, is it likely cancer is already much better controlled via immunotherapy / CAR-T (even in solid tumors), making this less impactful?

Would really appreciate any corrections to my super naive and flawed reasoning…