We are very excited about the recent additional support! With that we can design, model and test even more proteins!
I am a post-doc at UW and I am working on designing protein-protein interactions to a variety of protein target molecules that are involved in diseases. Currently, I am mostly focusing on designing small inhibitor proteins that bind to viral surface proteins. The idea is to block important sites on the virus that are necessary for its propagation. I mostly work on Influenza as that is still one of the major health concerns. We do not have many therapeutics to fight it, besides seasonal vaccines. Every year the flu mutates and we loose our immunity against the current strain. Hence, having fast ways to generate a anti-potion to an upcoming flu strain is one way to fight it. The other is to know what the changing parts of the flu virus are and based on that make quickly adaptable or possibly universal flu therapeutics. Designs for this are typically labeled "flu."
We are also currently working on getting inhibitors against the Ebola virus (http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/). The structures of important surface proteins are known, so we're trying out multiple methods which we have developed in the last couple of years to fight this disease. Those jobs are typically named "ebo."
Thank you for your support!

Right! let's do it!

I've read that a certain virus, possibly influenza, uses triangles of three of a certain protein to enter human cells. There are also a number of single units of this protein elsewhere on the outside of the virus.

This suggests trying to find something that binds tightly to those triangles, but not to the single units, to find a treatment method likely to resist all mutations that do not affect this specific protein.

I'm happy to see the Ebola work, but appear to be receiving only a few Ebola tasks for processing.....?

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZMapp

:)

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