It was a great year for the Institute for Protein Design and we couldn’t have done all of our amazing work without the support from our donors and contributors! Thank you to everyone who helped us, whether through a donation, collaboration, playing Foldit, or otherwise. We’ve filled the IPD Newsletter with all of the progress …
Today, the first IPD spin out company Cyrus Biotechnology announced the closing of an $8M total Series A financing. The investment was led by Trinity Ventures, with participation from OrbiMed Advisors, SpringRock Ventures, W Fund, WRF Capital (a major supporter of the IPD), and individual investors. Congratulations Cyrus team! Cyrus is commercializing Cyrus Bench® an innovative user friendly software as …
Today, Baker lab spin out company Arzeda announced that it had raised $12 million in a Series A round of funding led by OS Fund and including Bioeconomy Capital and Sustainable Conversion Ventures, as well as a follow-on investment from Arzeda’s seed investor, WRF Capital (a major supporter of the IPD). The new funding will enable “Technology …
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, …
Today, a multidisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Washington, Fred Hutch, and The Scripps Research Institute published in Nature Biotechnology the computational design of a trimeric influenza-neutralizing protein that binds extremely tightly to the H3 hemagglutinin of 1968 Hong Kong pandemic influenza virus (A/Hong Kong/X31/1968). It also cross-reacts with human relevant H1, H2 and …
Researchers in the Baker lab at the Institute for Protein Design, working in collaboration with the Joint Genome Institute, published in Science the solved folds and structures for hundreds of protein families. This “big data” approach to large scale protein structure determination was made possible by a team effort that analyzed billions of gene sequences …
A few months ago, it was announced that the Institute for Protein Design is one of UW Medicine’s Priorities in their ACCELERATE campaign. We are grateful to have this support not only from UW Medicine, but also from donors who are contributing funds so that we may continue our work. One such gift came from …
The latest paper coming out from the IPD was published today on the Science website. It’s titled “Principles for designing proteins with cavities formed by curved β sheets” with first co-authors Enrique Marcos and Benjamin Basanta, a former and current IPD member, respectively. Other IPD members on the paper include Tamuka Chidyausiku, Gustav Oberdorfer, Daniel-Adriano …
On January 5th, recent IPD spin-out PvP Biologics announced their agreement with Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited. The $35 million deal includes an option to acquire PvP at a later point. PvP has released a statement on their website, and the agreement was highly covered by other news sources, which can be found at the …
We are happy to congratulate Ingrid Swanson Pultz, an IPD Translational Investigator, and Clancey Wolf, a Research Scientist, on PvP Biologics‘ spinout! The news was announced this morning and has been circulated through various outlets. The company, created in 2015, is focusing on advancing KumaMax, a gluten-fighting enzyme that could potentially be taken orally to …
Seattle-based Arzeda, a computational and synthetic biology company that was spun out from the University of Washington labs of Prof. David Baker, recently announced that its high-throughput, automated pipeline for protein engineering and pathway discovery had been validated by the production of two keystone molecules. The announcement is a major technical milestone for Arzeda’s approach …
Today is Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophy Day, and the Institute for Protein Design is collaborating with the Jain Foundation and Foldit community to to model the structure of human dysferlin protein (DYSF), an important protein for normal muscle function. Numerous mutations in the gene that encodes DYSF protein are known to be the cause of …
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 …
It was a great year for the Institute for Protein Design and we couldn’t have done all of our amazing work without the support from our donors and contributors! Thank you to everyone who helped us, whether through a donation, collaboration, playing Foldit, or otherwise. We’ve filled the IPD Newsletter with all of the progress …
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 …
The Baker lab, in collaboration with Neil King, Trisha Davis and Tamir Gonen’s labs, recently had a paper published in Nature about a stable icosahedral nanocage whose applications could span anywhere from drug delivery to vaccine design! The title is “Design of a hyperstable 60-subunit protein icosahedron” and it was published online June 15, 2016. …
A paper recently published in Science by several members of the IPD, in collaboration with others, entitled “De novo design of protein homo-oligomers with modular hydrogen-bond network-mediated specificity,” discusses designing proteins in a similar way to DNA so that they may be used to engineer structures. Geekwire has written up a great article about the paper; …
Over the weekend, Foldit had its 8th birthday! In celebration, they will be tweeting (@Foldit) fun facts and infographics on their feed. Haven’t heard of the game or tried playing it yet? What better time than now! Click here to learn more and to join an ever-growing community that spans the world. Who knows, maybe …
On Monday, representatives from the IPD spoke on a panel at Xconomy’s EXOME’s Seattle’s Life Science Disruptors 2016 event. It was titled “Proteins Like You’ve Never Seen” and included Lucas Nivon (Cyrus), Ingrid Swanson Putlz (PvP Biologics), Aaron Chevalier (Virvio), and David Baker. The event’s description was as follows: Seattle is one of the few …
We are proud to announce that last week, David was named winner of Seattle Business‘ 2016 Leaders in Health Care Awards for “Outstanding Achievement in Delivery of Digital Health.” The award was one of several given out, with categories ranging from “Lifetime Achievement” to “Outstanding Achievement: Health Care Delivery.” Although David was ill and unable …
On February 18th, WRF Fellow Franziska Seeger gave a talk about proteins at Ignite Seattle. Presenters have 5 minutes to speak to the audience and deliver whatever point they are trying to get across. They also cannot control their slides, so they have to have their timing perfect. Talk about pressure! However, we believe that …
On February 9th, Arzeda, and Mitsubishi Rayon Ltd announced that they would “collaborate on development of new processes for industrial chemicals production.” Read more about it on Mitsubishi Rayon’s website, here, or on Arzeda’s site, here. Arzeda is an IPD spin-out, of which David Baker is a co-founder and Scientific Advisory Board Member.
Today at 11am, the paper titled “A Computationally Designed Hemagglutinin Stem-Binding Protein Provides In Vivo Protection from Influenza Independent of a Host Immune Response” was published to the PLOS Pathogen website. This paper was contributed to by several IPD members, including Aaron Chevalier, Jorgen Nelson, Lance Stewart, Lauren Carter, and David Baker. The research was performed …
Recently, UW Medicine Pulse released a podcast featuring none other than our very own Ingrid Swanson Pultz! They talked to her about KumaMax and how it would help those with Celiac’s disease. Go here to see their post on it and listen to the podcast! Would you like to contribute to her research? Please go …
[envira-gallery id=”3246″] Custom design with atomic level accuracy enables researchers to craft a whole new world of proteins Naturally occurring proteins are the nanoscale machines that carry out essentially all of the critical functions in living things. While it has been known for over 40 years that the sequence of amino acids completely determines the …
In the early 1990s, researchers in the field of protein structure prediction were challenged by the problem of how to impartially judge the accuracy of prediction algorithms. This realization led the protein structure prediction the community to start the Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP), a community-wide, worldwide experiment for protein structure prediction taking …
We are looking for people to join us to help achieve our goal “to engineer a whole new world of synthetic proteins that address 21st century challenges in medicine, energy, and technology.” Interested? Read on! The newest faculty to join the IPD, Liangcai Gu, PhD, is actively recruiting postdoc fellows to work on …
RESEARCH IPD Translational Investigator, Dr. Ingrid Pultz, published a paper in JACS this month titled ‘Engineering of Kuma030: A Gliadin Peptidase That Rapidly Degrades Immunogenic Gliadin Peptides in Gastric Conditions‘. Using Rosetta to redesign the active site of the gliadin protease KumaMax – an enzyme computationally designed to break down gluten in the stomach – Dr. Pultz and …
Cyrus Biotechnology, the first company spinout from the IPD’s Translational Investigator Program, welcomes their new EVP of Sales, Rosario Caltabiano. Follow the link to the Cyrus website to learn more: http://cyrusbio.com/2015/10/01/cyrus-welcomes-evp-rosario-caltabiano/
RESEARCH Following the groundbreaking 2014 Nature paper describing the development of a computational method to design multi-component coassembling protein nanoparticles, comes a publication in Protein Science from Baker lab graduate student Jacob Bale and collaborators. Titled “Structure of a designed tetrahedral protein assembly variant engineered to have improved soluble expression“, the paper reports a variant of a previously low …
RESEARCH In an article out in Structure, Baker lab postdoc Dr. Hahnbeom Park in collaboration with IPD Assistant Professor Frank DiMaio investigate the origin of protein structure refinement from structural averaging at the residue level. Structure refinement has long been a challenge in the field of protein structure prediction and it aims to improve homology …
RESEARCH A new Science paper is out from Dr. David Baker and IPD collaborator Dr. Tamir Gonen (HHMI Janelia Campus) titled Design of ordered two-dimensional arrays mediated by noncovalent protein-protein interfaces. Graduate student Shane Gonen and Dr. Frank DiMaio describe a new computational approach to design two-dimensional protein arrays with a number of exciting potential applications …
A new Science paper is out from IPD faculty Dr. David Baker titled Design of ordered two-dimensional arrays mediated by noncovalent protein-protein interfaces. Read the abstract below and the article at the link: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/348/6241/1365 We describe a general approach to designing two-dimensional (2D) protein arrays mediated by noncovalent protein-protein interfaces. Protein homo-oligomers are placed into one of the …
Seattle, WA Today, we are announcing that Cyrus Biotechnology, has been successfully launched from the UW Institute for Protein Design (IPD) to pursue commercialization of an innovative user friendly software as a service (SaaS) cloud computing solution for distribution of the powerful “Rosetta” protein structure prediction and design algorithms. “Cyrus is the first new IPD …
The May IPD News Roundup covers a new Science paper from IPD Assistant Prof Frank DiMaio, a KOMO News interview with Translational Investigator Ingrid Swanson Pultz on celiac disease, and much more! At the link.
A new Science paper is out from IPD faculty Dr. Frank DiMaio titled A virus that infects a hyperthermophile encapsidates A-form DNA. Read the abstract below and the article at the link: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/348/6237/914.full.pdf Extremophiles, microorganisms thriving in extreme environmental conditions, must have proteins and nucleic acids that are stable at extremes of temperature and pH. The nonenveloped, …
The exciting protein design work by IPD researchers and collaborators in PNAS titled Computational protein design enables a novel one-carbon assimilation pathway has been featured in a Nature Chemical Biology News and Views piece. Follow the link to check it out: nchembio.1819
April IPD News Roundup is live at this link!
The March 2015 IPD news roundup is here! A new publication in PNAS on a completely novel metabolic pathway made via protein design and more. Read about it at the link.
This month’s roundup features an interview and two papers from IPD Assistant Professor Frank DiMaio as well as a new Science paper from the Baker lab on trapping transition states using protein design. Read more at the link.
David Baker, IPD Director and Professor of Biochemistry at the UW was the Plenary Speaker at this year’s AAAS meeting in San Francisco. A video of his talk, titled ‘Post-Evolutionary Biology: Design of Novel Protein Structures, Functions, and Assemblies’ covers a breadth of information on ongoing IPD research and can be viewed at the following …
A little late this month but it’s here!!! The January news roundup talks about a new Nature journal paper from the Baker lab, the second Mini Symposium, and much more. Follow the link and read more!
The Institute for Protein Design is seeking an MBA student to work with Institute leadership to collect market data on small molecule therapeutic targets for protein design. More information about this exciting independent study opportunity can be found on our Employment page here.
The Institute for Protein Design is pleased to announce its new advisory board! Follow the link to our news release for more information on our board members.
Our next Mini Symposium will be hosted on Jan 20 2015 and will feature Drs. Bill DeGrado (UCSF) and Gevorg Grigoryan (Dartmouth) speaking on “New Approaches to Protein Design”. More information at this link.
We wrapped up 2014 with a bang – introducing a new logo, getting a major award for celiac disease research, and successfully hosting our first Mini Symposium! Follow the link to read more.
Please make a tax deductible donation at this LINK. IPD Translational Investigator Dr. Ingrid Swanson Pultz was awarded a Matching Grant award of $250K from the Life Sciences Discovery Fund (LSDF) for her project ‘In vivo assessment of an oral therapeutic for celiac disease‘! We need to raise an additional $74K …
Staff and scientists of the IPD and Foldit volunteered at Pacific Science Center’s Life Sciences Research Weekend this month – teaching budding scientists about the awesomeness of protein folding! Pics from the event and more Institute news at the link.
The UW Institute of Protein Design (IPD) presents a Mini Symposium on “Sweet Spots for Designed Proteins as Therapeutics” on Weds Dec 10 at 9 AM in HSB D-209. Follow the link to get more details! We hope to see you there!
Happy Fall from the IPD! Read about our October happenings in this month’s news roundup. Click here to read more.
A new paper is out in this week’s issue of Science entitled High thermodynamic stability of parametrically designed helical bundles. Using novel computational design methods, extremely stable helical bundles can be custom designed with fine-tuned structural geometries for a number of applications. Read more about this exciting work at this link.
We awarded our first round of WRF Innovation Postdoctoral fellowships this month! Follow the link to learn about our new fellows and to catch up on the research ongoing at the IPD.
The Foldit community has been leading the charge in the computational design of proteins to bind Ebola. Learn more about this work and other ongoing Institute news at the link.
Learn how the IPD and Translational Investigator Dr. Ingrid Swanson Pultz are developing Kumamax, an oral therapeutic candidate for celiac disease. A slide presentation and more information at the link.
The Foldit community to targets Ebola. Click here to learn more. Watch grad student Brian Koepnick and IPD Director David Baker talk about this work on this KOMO TV news segment. See the Seattle Times article here. Make a donation to help us fund our anti-Ebola effort.
Watch a video documenting a recent hike at The Brothers in the Olympics. IPD scientists, mountain goats, and stellar views – oh my!
Read a post about how the power of volunteer computing drives advances in protein design! Learn more at the link.
Read a letter from Institute for Protein Design Director Dr. David Baker summarizing the exciting accomplishments and progress made at the IPD in the past year.
This July, IPD staff and scientists ventured outdoors for a conference and for some fun adventures. Learn more at the link.
June at the IPD welcomed some new team members and saw some exciting new publications! Learn more here.
What if scientists could design a completely new protein that is precision-tuned to bind and inhibit cancer-causing proteins in the body? Collaborating scientists at the UW Institute for Protein Design (IPD) and Molecular Engineering and Sciences Institute (MolES) have made this idea a reality with the designed protein BINDI. BINDI (BHRF1-INhibiting Design acting Intracellularly) is a completely novel protein, based …
A new paper is out in the June 5 issue of Nature entitled Accurate design of co-assembling multi-component protein nanomaterials. Scientists at the Institute for Protein Design (IPD), in collaboration with researchers at UCLA and HHMI, have built upon their previous work constructing single-component protein nanocages and can now design and build self-assembling protein nanomaterials made up of …
May was a busy month at the IPD, with some new publications and exciting announcements! Learn more here.
In a recent PNAS paper entitled “Removing T-cell epitopes with computational protein design”, IPD researchers combine machine learning with computational protein design to demonstrate immune silencing of protein targets. This deimmunization has the potential to reduce or eliminate immunogenicity of protein therapeutics. Learn more at this link.
A recent Nature issue exposed the dismaying fact that many women are deterred from pursuing a career in science, especially at the highest levels (postdoctoral positions, faculty position, scientific advisory boards to start up companies, etc). To talk about this significant gender gap in science and the issues female scientists face, Baker lab members participated …
May 15, 2014 With a very generous $8 M gift from the Washington Research Foundation (WRF), the IPD has launched the WRF-IPD Innovation Fellows Program supporting research partnerships between the IPD and other Seattle-area research institutes or UW departments. We are recruiting exceptionally talented researchers who have just finished their PhD to join expert laboratories at local institutions where they …
The “Three Dreamers” are a group of Seattle-based philanthropists whose family members are suffering from Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The IPD has partnered with the Three Dreamers, the Foldit community and AD researchers at the UW to design new proteins targeting amyloid, thought to be the cause of AD. Learn more at this link.
Re/Code writer James Temple has written an interesting article on David Baker’s efforts to design a new world of proteins. The article covers the IPD efforts to design proteins that neutralize the flu virus, Alzheimer’s disease amyloid protein, and how the IPD is engaging citizen scientists in the Rosetta@home and Foldit projects. Learn more at …
Baker lab members published in Nature Chemical Biology a paper entitled “Design of activated serine-containing catalytic triads with atomic-level accuracy“, describing the computational design of proteins with idealized serine-containing catalytic triads which can capture and neutralize organophosphate probes. This work has utility in design of scavengers of environmental toxins. Learn more at this link.
Foldit is 5 years old. This publication entitled “Increasing public involvement in structural biology” chronicles the power of engaging the citizen science community on behalf of the computational challenge of protein folding. Learn more at this link.
What if scientists could design proteins to capture specific metals from our environment? The utility for cleaning up metals from waste water, soils, and our bodies could be tremendous. Dr. Jeremy Mills and collaborators in Dr. Baker’s group at the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design (IPD) address this challenge in the first reported …
In a widely cited Nature paper entitled Proof of principle for epitope-focused vaccine design, IPD researchers and collaborators invented a new method to design novel proteins for use as a candidate vaccines to protect against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a significant cause of infant mortality. Learn more at this link.
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.
Purification of antibody IgG from crude serum or culture medium is required for virtually all research, diagnostic, and therapeutic antibody applications. Researchers at the Institute for Protein Design (IPD) have used computational methods to design a new protein (called “Fc-Binder”) that is programed to bind to the constant portion of IgG (aka “Fc” region) at basic …
Dr. Ingrid Swanson Pultz, a Translational Investigator at the Institute for Protein Design won first prize at the UW Center for Commercialization 2013 Innovator Recognition Event, for KumaMax, an enzyme designed in the Baker lab to efficiently break down gluten within the acidic environment of the stomach, before it can reach the small intestine where intact gluten …
David Baker, Head of the Institute for Protein Design was recently in Toronto, Canada in late October to deliver a lecture on protein design as part of Gairdner Award celebrations. This was written up in the Globe and Mail. Learn more at this link.
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.
V-type nerve agents are among the most toxic compounds known, and are chemically related to pesticides widespread in the environment. Using an integrated approach, described in an ACS Chemical Biology paper entitled Engineering V-type nerve agents detoxifying enzymes using computationally focused libraries, Dr. Izhack Cherny, Dr. Per Greisen, and collaborators increased the rate of nerve …
IPD researchers in the Baker group have improved protein computational design algorithms by “Automating human intuition for protein design.” Read more at this link.
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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.
Researchers in the Baker group describe an improved method for comparative modeling, RosettaCM, which optimizes a physically realistic all-atom energy function over the conformational space defined by homologous structures. Learn more at this link.
In a Journal of Molecular Biology publication entitled Computational design of a protein-based enzyme inhibitor, Dr. Erik Procko and collaborators describe the computational design of a protein-based enzyme inhibitor that binds the polar active site of hen egg lysosome (HEL). Computational design of a protein that binds polar surfaces has not been previously accomplished. Learn …
Brain cancer is a serious unmet medical challenge, and Washington state is one of the leading research clusters working on glioblastoma. Here we report on how RosettaDesign proteins are being used to treat brain cancer! Read more about this important translational protein design effort here.
The Life Sciences Discovery Fund (LSDF) today announced its latest round of Opportunity Grants, and awarded $1.4 M to the University of Washington (UW) to “Launch of the Institute for Protein Design for Creating New Therapeutics, Vaccines and Diagnostics.” This LSDF Opportunity Grant Award will enable the IPD Translational Investigators to improve upon protein design discoveries so that they …
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.
IPD researchers in the Baker group have published new computational protocols for preparing protein scaffold libraries for functional site design. Their paper entitled “A Pareto-optimal refinement method for protein design scaffolds“ improves the search for amino acids with the lowest energy subject to a set of constraints specifying function. Learn more at this link.
Dr. David Baker, Director of the IPD delivered the Centenary Award and Frederick Gowland Hopkins Memorial Lecture at at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK, on December, 13, 2012. Baker’s lecture entitled “Protein folding, structure prediction and design” can be read at this published link. See: Baker, D. (2014). Protein folding, structure prediction and design.. Biochemical Society …
A team from David Baker’s laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle have described a set of “rules” for the design of proteins from scratch, and have demonstrated the successful design of five new proteins that fold reliably into predicted conformations. Their work was published Nature. Learn more at this link.
The Institute for Protein Design and David Baker’s laboratory have moved into the new Molecular Engineering & Sciences Building located in the heart of the University of Washington campus. Read about the Institute’s new home and its exciting research in the Seattle Times, and also at this link.
As reported in Nature Biotechnology, David Baker and scientists at the IPD published exciting new methods to improve the potency and breadth of computer-designed protein inhibitors of influenza. Learn more at this link.
IPD researchers in the Baker group have published in Science a paper entitled “Computational design of self-assembling protein nanomaterials with atomic level accuracy.” They describe a general computational method for designing proteins that self-assemble to a desired symmetric architecture. Protein building blocks are docked together symmetrically to identify complementary packing arrangements, and low-energy protein-protein interfaces are then designed …
Dr. Paul Ramsey, CEO of UW Medicine, announces the establishment of the Institute for Protein Design (IPD). “A major challenge for designing proteins for specific purposes is predicting three-dimensional shape from the amino acid sequence. Dr. David Baker, UW professor of biochemistry and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, has had remarkable success in …
