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A universal flu vaccine that immunizes someone for life. Intelligent proteins able to identify cancer cells. Proteins of nanomaterials that self-assemble and could be used for solar energy.
This is the kind of big thorny issues that the Institute for Protein Design of the UW School of Medicine wants to solve. And he just received $ 45 million to do it.
The money comes from The Audacious Project, a philanthropic collaboration managed by TED, which focuses on projects that bring about profound changes in the world. It will be used to hire more engineers, scientists, instructors and full professors, as well as to support more postdoctoral fellows and graduate students.
David Baker, Director of the UW Institute, wants to create a modern version of Bell Laboratories, which has attracted some of the world's leading thinkers to help advance the many advances in technology used today, from lasers to communications satellites.
Baker said he hoped to "recruit the best and brightest talent from around the world, at every step of their career, to join what we call the" revolution of protein design "."
Proteins, which are large molecules made up of one or more amino acid chains, are essential to living things because they help the cells and organs of the body to function. They also include enzymes and antibodies.
Researchers at the institute use computers to create proteins from scratch, able to do what natural proteins do – and some things they can not do. In the past, protein design involved tweaking existing proteins or looking for new types of natural proteins.
The ability to create new proteins opens the door to projects such as a vaccine this would protect against many strains of influenza, as opposed to the four strains that the current seasonal vaccine attempts to replicate each year. The institute is already working on this issue with the National Institutes of Health, but the money allocated on Tuesday could help make it a reality.
"I think we'll probably need more firepower to make it truly universal, and the Audacious project will allow us to do that," said Neil King, assistant professor of biochemistry at the UW School of Medicine. Medicine. is working on the flu vaccine.
What researchers learn by developing a flu vaccine can be applied to many other biomedical problems, King explained, his face lighting up as he sat in an office littered with protein models resembling toys. for children. He said the discovery of a flu vaccine, which presents a moderate difficulty, could put researchers on the path to more difficult vaccines, such as HIV, malaria, hepatitis C and even the cancer.
"It takes new technology to turn that into something robust and that actually works on a regular basis," said King.
Unlocking this potential largely explains why the Audacious project awarded the money to UW, said Anna Verghese, executive director of the project, in a statement.
The institute's previous work in the field has also given it an advantage.
"The Institute for Protein Design is a long-time pioneer in computer-aided protein design," Verghese said. "Now, with a solid plan in place and support via Audacity Project, the Institute for Protein Design will attempt to accelerate the pace of discovery, disseminate new protein technologies, and fundamentally change the way in which drugs, vaccines, fuels and new materials are being manufactured. "
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