Word: proteins
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...California Institute of Technology, for example, Bassil Dahiyat and his professor Stephen Mayo ran into resistance when they proposed a new approach to fighting disease. They argued that because protein shapes vary according to their functions, it should be possible to create new disease-fighting proteins by first imagining their shape. "You could hear the people at Caltech snicker," says Dahiyat...
...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. About a minute later, he noticed that the protein was taking form. "I could see it wasn't spaghetti," he says. "I said, 'Oh, my God, we've got structure...
Dahiyat and his professor may have the last laugh. In 1997 they founded Xencor, with Dahiyat in charge, based on the protein-creation process called Protein Design Automation (PDA) that they had refined on the supercomputer. If all goes as planned, in about a year Xencor will start human trials of a protein that combats multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and other diseases. Xencor has signed contracts with Genentech, Eli Lilly and other companies to develop additional drugs...
Jennie Mather left biotech company Genentech also out of frustration when, she says, her bosses wouldn't accept her approach to fighting cancer. She argued that what really counts in a target protein--that is, a protein that causes a disease and that a drug would aim to disable--is the protein's surface. Because a body's natural antibodies do their work entirely on the cell's exterior, she reasoned, drugs should work the same way. Such thinking was heresy to Genentech, whose scientists, she says, generally analyze a target's entire genetic structure. "They were just interested...
Genentech says it pioneered the use of antibodies that target the surface protein of cancer, and its popular drugs work on that principle. Nevertheless, Mather saw a way to carve several years out of drug development and left to found Raven Biotechnologies, a drug-discovery company based in South San Francisco. She created a process to keep cells alive outside the body, so she could test her theory in the lab. Her efforts paid off. In December the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved one of her drugs for human testing. The drug, called RAV 12, is a protein that...