Project Violet combines many different areas of science. In this section we describe some of the main ideas behind Project Violet. If you get stuck on any of the science terms, please check out our 'Glossary' section.
Project Violet is making medicines from nature. Scientists often refer to many medicines as "drugs"; they call the process of researching and developing new medicines, "drug discovery". (We will use the term "drug" in replacement of "medicines" in this site, as is done in the scientific community.)
While knottins are "natural" medicines, they did not evolve to treat human disease. Project Violet changes parts of the known knottins in order to try to create medicines out of them.