Protein design for drug delivery applications

Viruses have evolved to use proteins to overcome cell membrane to deliver their genetic information into host cells. Inspired by the viral spike/capsid proteins, we are trying to design new proteins that can either (1) induce membrane fusion between host membrane and membrane of drug carrier (liposomes or LNPs), or (2) disrupt host cell membrane. By using current cutting-edge machine learning-based protein design tools, we have made significant progress on making new designed proteins towards efficient intracellular delivery of various therapeutic modalities (protein, RNA etc).

References

1. Yang EC, Divine R, Miranda MC, Borst AJ, Sheffler W, Zhang JZ, Decarreau J, Saragovi A, Abedi M, Goldbach N, Ahlrichs M, Dobbins C, Hand A, Cheng S, Lamb M, Levine PM, Chan S, Skotheim R, Fallas J, Ueda G, Lubner J, Somiya M, Khmelinskaia A, King NP, Baker D., “Computational design of non-porous, pH-responsive antibody nanoparticles,” bioRxiv, p. 2023.04.17.537263, Apr. 2023, doi: 10.1101/2023.04.17.537263.