Discovery of Therapeutic Antibodies and Enzymes

2006 Dale Pearson Lectures
Presented by

Professor George Georgiou
University of Texas, Austin

Date: Monday
April 3, 2006
4:00 p.m.
Place: Engineering Sciences Building
ESB Room 1001

ABSTRACT

One of the long-term interests of our group is the engineering of proteins for pharmaceutical and biotechnology applications. To this end, we have developed a set of ultra-high throughput screening techniques that enable the isolation of novel proteins with desired functions from ensembles (“libraries”) of hundreds of millions of protein variants, created by molecular biology techniques. These studies have led to the engineering of therapeutic antibodies that neutralize bacterial pathogens and of enzymes that exhibit exquisite catalytic activity. The biochemical characterization of the resulting engineered proteins has provided a wealth of mechanistic information that has aided the understanding of molecular recognition and biocatalysis. Three specific examples will be discussed as part of this talk:

(a) The development, and therapeutic evaluation, of recombinant antibodies for protection against anthrax.

(b) The engineering of proteases that exhibit exceptional activity and selectivity towards the cleavage of desired peptide targets

(c) “Enzyme humanization” to help alleviate adverse immunological responses in enzyme therapies.