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...Their innovations are a testimony to the do-it-yourself spirit that fuels both technology and entrepreneurship. Indeed, many of this year's Pioneers had to leave comfortable corporate or academic jobs in order to solve problems that have confounded others for years. "You could hear the people at Caltech snicker,'' says Xencor co-founder Bassil Dahiyat, recalling his graduate days at California Institute of Technology when he proposed that since protein shapes vary according to their functions, one could create new disease-fighting proteins by first imagining their shape. Looks like he may be right - Dahiyat now says...
...hundred miles south at Xencor in Monrovia, California, Dahiyat is also experimenting with proteins that he hopes will become disease-fighting drugs. If all goes as planned at his Caltech spin-off, in about a year Xencor will start human trials of a protein that combats multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and other diseases...
...causes inflammatory diseases. Xencor's protein binds with the excess TNK and shuts it down. The company believes this is a superior approach to existing treatments, which simply seek to lower TNK levels. Xencor's approach derives from a process Dahiyat invented in 1997 while a graduate student at Caltech. Instead of using time-consuming methods like trial and error, he asked a computer to figure out what mix of amino acids would make a protein of a particular shape. (Shape is important because a protein's structure determines its function. Just like a flathead screwdriver is appropriate for some...
...Dahiyat wanted to show that he could make a V-shaped protein with a coil falling off the top of one arm. His Caltech colleagues laughed, but off he went to the supercomputer at Caltech's famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "I said, here's the shape I want to make, tell us the sequence,'' he recalls. By the end of the day, the computer gave him billions of possible amino acid combinations and recommended the best one. Dahiyat threw that sequence into a small, tunnel-like device called an NMR spectrometer. About a minute later, Dahiyat noticed that...
Zuckerberg, who created Wirehog along with Andrew K. McCollum ’06-’07 and Adam D’Angelo, a junior at CalTech, said the program’s future release schedule was still tentative...