David Baker, collaborator of the BBT, awarded with the Nobel prize in chemistry.

Oct 16, 2024

David Baker, director of the Institute for Protein Design (IPD) at the University of Washington (UW, Seattle), supervisor of Jordi Guillem-Marti during his Marie Curie Global Fellowship in the USA (2019-2021) and current collaborator of the group, has won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his contributions in using machine learning to predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins and designing them from scratch.

David Baker, collaborator of the BBT, awarded with the Nobel prize in chemistry.

Baker Lab develops protein design software and uses it to create molecules that are experimentally tested in the lab. These proteins are designed to be used as novel therapeutics for cancer, neurological diseases, and more, as well as new vaccines, nanomaterials and enzymes, aiming at solve challenges in medicine and technology.

BBT's researcher Jordi Guillem-Marti worked for 2 years at Baker Lab during the his Marie Curie Global Fellowship (2019-2021), ENGAGE: ENGineering extracellular matrix-based de novo proteins with high Affinity to Growth factors for Enhancing bone regeneration.

During his stay, Dr. Guillem-Martí computationally designed proteins able to interact with receptors that regulate bone regeneration, an ongoing project in collaboration with Professors David Baker and
Andrew Hinck (University of Pittsburgh). In addition to this, he also contributed to the computational design of novel proteins with structures not found in nature, as well as proteins able to attract cells.

In this context, there are two preprints on BioRXiv pending for final publication (De Novo Design of Integrin α5β1 Modulating Proteins for Regenerative Medicine; and Multispectral live-cell imaging with uncompromised spatiotemporal resolution).