You and the UW Institute for Protein Design

Imagine taking the building blocks of life — proteins — and re-designing them to “fix” major problems in medicine, like cancer, or Alzheimer’s or the flu.

You can help our researchers do just that! By supporting the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design. Use the convenient giving form at right, or read more about protein design, below.

The Power of Proteins

“Looking at the range of things that proteins do in living systems gives you a hint of what proteins could do if you designed them to order.”

—David Baker, Ph.D., Director
    UW Institute for Protein Design
 

Proteins are the body’s workhorses, responsible for everything from digesting food to building tissue. They do nearly every job, at every moment, within the body. When they malfunction, the result is disease or illness.

Drugs today are designed to fix malfunctions: to go into the body, to bind to ill-performing proteins, and to change the course of a disease. Many of these drugs, however, are derived from small molecules. This can limit their effectiveness and their precision when binding to proteins, which are much larger molecules.

Researchers at the Institute for Protein Design are working to create proteins that will bind more effectively and more precisely to malfunctioning proteins in the body. They’ve already developed proteins with new functions, including HIV vaccine candidates and flu inhibitors — and the sky, quite literally, is the limit.

Learn More