Tag: Institute for Protein Design

  • Open Philanthropy awards $11.3 million  to the Institute for Protein Design

    Open Philanthropy awards $11.3 million to the Institute for Protein Design

    The funds will support our technological revolution in protein design and enable the development of a universal flu vaccine. The $11.3 gift is one of the largest made to date by the San Francisco-based philanthropy in support of science. It is also the first to go to UW Medicine. The gift comes in two parts:…

  • De Novo Design of Membrane Proteins

    De Novo Design of Membrane Proteins

    It is now possible to create complex, custom-designed transmembrane proteins from scratch !   Today Baker lab members published in Science  “Accurate computational design of multipass transmembrane proteins” The Abstract reads as follows: The computational design of transmembrane proteins with more than one membrane-spanning region remains a major challenge. We report the design of transmembrane monomers,…

  • David Baker profiled in The New York Times

    David Baker profiled in The New York Times

    At the end of a historic year for protein design, the Baker Lab was honored to be profiled in the New York Times by science writer Carl Zimmer. He writes about the technology, progress, and promise in the field, including the contributions from our wonderful crowdsource participants. Graphic: John Hersey / New York Times On the…

  • A New World of Designed Macrocycles

    A New World of Designed Macrocycles

    Today marks another major step forward for peptide based drug discovery.  IPD researchers report in Science the computational design of a new world of small cyclic peptides, “Macrocycles”,  increasing the number of the known kinds of these molecules by multiple fold.  The conceptual art image below “Illuminating the energy landscape” shows the power of computational design…

  • Synthetic Nucleocapsids Have Arrived

    Synthetic Nucleocapsids Have Arrived

    Published today in Nature, IPD researchers describe the first synthetic protein assemblies — dubbed synthetic nucleocapsids — that encapsulate their own genome and evolve in complex environments. Synthetic nucleocapsids are built to resemble viral capsids and could be used in future to deliver therapeutics to specific cells and tissues. These icosahedral protein assemblies are based off of…

  • The Matrix of Protein Design

    The Matrix of Protein Design

    The Matrix movie (1999) depicts a future in which the reality perceived by most humans is actually a computer simulated reality called “the Matrix”.  Published today in Science, the Baker lab and collaborators report on a new kind of Matrix –  a new reality for large scale computational protein design which can achieve massive data driven improvements in our ability to design highly stable,…

  • Hyper-stable Designed Peptides and the Coming of Age for De Novo Protein Design

    Hyper-stable Designed Peptides and the Coming of Age for De Novo Protein Design

    Small constrained peptides combine the stability of small molecule drugs with the selectivity and potency of antibody-based therapeutics. However, peptide-based therapeutics have largely remained underexplored due to the limited diversity of naturally occurring peptide scaffolds, and a lack of methods to design them rationally.  New computational design and wet lab methods developed at the Institute for…

  • Designed Protein Containers Push Bioengineering Boundaries

    Designed Protein Containers Push Bioengineering Boundaries

    Earlier this month, Baker lab researchers reported the computational design of a hyperstable 60-subunit protein icosahedron in Nature (Hsia et al); icosahedral protein structures are commonly observed in natural biological systems for packaging and transport (e.g. viral capsids). The described design was composed of 60 trimeric protein building blocks that self-assembled in a nanocage. In…

  • Seattle Health Innovators Visit the IPD

    The Seattle Health Innovators recently visited the Institute for Protein Design, and wrote a nice blog entitled “Crowdsourcing the design of new molecules to improve healthcare and the environment.”  The article provides a nice look into the Institute for Protein Design.  Learn more at this link.

  • GIVING IN ACTION: Making Dreams Come True at the IPD

    Thank you to our supporters.  GIVING IN ACTION: Making Dreams Come True. Barton Family Foundation, Life Sciences Discovery Fund, Bruce and Jeannie Nordstrom, and Three Dreamers all supporting the IPD. Thank you all for your help in supporting our efforts in protein design.

  • Professor David Baker Provides an In Depth Discussion on Protein Design

    Prof. David Baker, Head of the UW Institute for Protein Design, HHMI Investigator provides an in depth discussion on the design of protein structures, functions and assemblies.  Click here to watch the video.

  • Institute for Protein Design Infograph

    [soliloquy id=”345″]

  • One Small Molecule Binding Protein, One Giant Leap for Protein Design

    One Small Molecule Binding Protein, One Giant Leap for Protein Design

    Reported on-line  in Nature (Sept. 4, 2013) researchers at the Institute for Protein Design describe the use of Rosetta computer algorithms to design a protein which binds with high affinity and specificity to a small drug molecule, digoxigenin a dangerous but sometimes life saving cardiac glycoside.  Learn more at this link.