‘A major step forward': Scientists unveil new approach for designing protein drugs against any target
When Longxing Cao arrived as a postdoc at the University of Washington in 2017, David Baker’s lab was already known as the leader in a niche field of designing new proteins from scratch.
The idea was to replace, or supplement, the usual method for designing new proteins, i.e. borrowing from evolution. To come up with most new biologic therapies for cancer or infectious disease, for example, researchers generally filter out the best antibodies mice or humans develop against a virus or bits of a tumor. Maybe they’ll tinker with it a little.
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