IN THE NEWS
– IPD Translational Investigator Dr. Ingrid Swanson Pultz was interviewed by KOMO News reporter Molly Shen for a story on living with celiac disease and the exciting research underway at the Institute to develop an oral therapeutic for the disease. Read the story at the link and watch the video here:
RESEARCH
New paper is out in Science from IPD faculty Dr. Frank DiMaio titled “A virus that infects a hyperthermophile encapsidates A-form DNA”. Dr. DiMaio and team used cryoEM to reconstruct the SIR2 virion. The abstract and link to the paper can be found here.
INSTITUTE
– Two more WRF Innovation Fellows joined this month! Welcome to postdoctoral fellows Gerard Daniel, PhD and Hua Bui, PhD. Gerard will be collaborating with Drs. Thomas Spiro and Karen Goldberg in UW Chemistry and Hua will be collaborating with Dr. David Galas at the Pacific Northwest Diabetes Research Institute.
– IPD Translational Investigator Dr. Ingrid Swanson Pultz was invited to participate in a panel discussion chaired by Governor Inslee entitled “The Future Is Bright: Washington State Government Support for Health Care and Life Sciences Entrepreneurs.” Dr. Pultz and four other life science and healthcare entrepreneurs were able to share their stories with an audience of 200+ gathered at the Cambia Grove, a local community space for healthcare innovation.
– The IPD was excited to host a second visit with the Three Dreamers – a Seattle-based philanthropy interested in investing funds towards new approaches to treating Alzheimer’s disease (AD). One year ago, the IPD and Foldit partnered with the Three Dreamers to start using protein design to computationally design new proteins that could one day become diagnostic or therapeutic agents for AD. This month, Three Dreamers visitors heard research updates from IPD scientists and were given a tour of the lab spaces. We are excited to continue this important collaboration!
– The IPD held its first Advisory Board meeting after first announcing the board back in January. Board members listened to an IPD mission overview, a number of research presentations, and discussed ways to best advance the numerous IPD projects.
IPD MEDIA
Have you checked out the IPD’s Education page? We’ve been updating it with various tutorials such as using Design Tracker or Basic Concepts in Rosetta. Most recently, we took a tour of the UW Tower with Systems Administrator Dr. Darwin Alonso to learn how compute support is provided to the numerous ongoing projects at the IPD. Watch the video below.
Undergraduate researcher Rachel Park shared a fantastic story of how she came to find herself doing research at the Institute for Protein Design and what it means to her. Hear her captivating story below.
OPPORTUNITIES
The IPD is offering an opportunity for a Practicum Independent Study for a Foster MBA student. An MBA Student is needed to work with IPD leadership to collect market data on “Small Molecule Binder” applications. The data will be used to build valuation models that will help us to better understand the commercial opportunities for these applications (or others).