Gleevec is one of the most successful cancer drugs available today, yet its working mechanism remained a mystery for decades. This is a problem, as understanding in detail how Gleevec works could lead to new cancer drugs better cancer therapies. Recently, Gleevec's working mechanism was solved in a surprising way, namely by studying the evolution of the Gleevec's drug target - the protein Src kinase. By resurrecting ancient proteins in the laboratory and studying their interaction with Gleevec, the mystery was finally solved. The method of "ancestral protein resurrection" thus holds great promise as a new way to study how drugs work and how to develop new, better drugs. Unfortunately, this process is slow, expensive and difficult to scale up in a laboratory. Therefore, we propose to simulate this discovery process on a computer, which would make it possible to use this approach for many drug systems on a scale that is not possible in the laboratory. We envision that such a method could be used for many other systems and their associated health problems, including bacterial resistance to antibiotics and other cancer-protein systems
