Nordic Life Science 1
CHEMISTRY // PROTEINS “The Baker lab is a fantast
ic example of how groundbreaking research can generate businesses, value creation, and solutions to tomorrow’s challenges. He is the director of the Institute for Protein Design at University of Washington School of Medicine that is often referred to as a start-up factory.” T HE NOBEL PRIZE in Chemistry 2024 is all about proteins. David Baker, the University of Washington and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, has succeeded in building entirely new kinds of proteins, and Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, Google DeepMind, have developed an AI model to predict proteins’ complex structures. Jan Terje Andersen, Professor and head of the Laboratory of Adaptive Immunity and Homeostasis at University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital and a member of the Centre of Excellence Precision Immunotherapy Alliance (PRIMA), has always been fascinated in how proteins, the final products that are encoded by our DNA, work. “They are essential for life and perform biological tasks that continuously go on in our body. As such they are like tiny machines or workhorses, always on a mission,” Terje Andersen says. Proteins can be very small or very large and complex and they are built up of amino acids that are connected in short or long chains. These chains fold into three-dimensional structures that define their architecture and function, explains Terje Andersen. “We have 20 amino acids that can be combined in a plethora of ways, and while some proteins consist of tens of such building blocks, others can be much more complex and contain several thousand,” he says. “How the proteins fold into very specific shapes has been a mystery, but the laureates have opened doors to this universe and given us tools that help us understand how proteins are built and turned into machines with distinct tasks,” he says. “These computational tools allow predictions on how altering a specific amino acid may affect the protein's function. Such knowledge has further guided NORDICLIFESCIENCE.ORG | 47 structure-based engineering of designer proteins, and even led to engineering of completely new proteins.” The latter was shown by David Baker and his lab about 20 years ago. Since then, this research has had an enormous scientific impact as protein engineers are using and developing computational tools to gain a better understanding of biology and diseases, and also of how such strategies can be used to tailor new biomedical technologies and medicines, describes Terje Andersen. “The Baker lab is a fantastic example of how groundbreaking research can generate businesses, value creation and solutions to tomorrow’s challenges. He is the director Jan Terje Andersen, Professor, head of the Laboratory of Adaptive Immunity and Homeostasis, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital PHOTO MOMENT STUDIO