Structural Genomics Consortium/UCL Protein Science Initiative Meeting
19 March 2024
UCL researchers and external stakeholders convened on 28th February 2024 for a Faculty-funded initiative driven by Professor Mat Todd and Professor Aled Edwards (Structural Genomics Consortium CEO, Toronto).
Speakers included Professors Todd and Edwards, along with a world-expert Visiting Scientist in protein production, Dr Nicola Burgess-Brown. The Dean of the Faculty of Life Sciences, Professor Stephanie Schorge, also presented, along with UCL Research, Innovation and Global Engagement (RIGE) and academics presenting case studies. The collaboration will be driven by the principles of open science and draw in machine learning.
Seed funding from the Faculty of Life Sciences is now supporting two technicians to increase capacity in protein production towards the generation of samples relevant to UCL research projects. These will be screened and the data made openly available to allow the machine learning community to predict commercially-available small molecules that bind these proteins.
The predictions will be experimentally evaluated in a small number of testing “hubs”. The resulting high-quality datasets will be used in future rounds to improve the ability of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to predict molecules that bind novel proteins, accelerating early-stage drug discovery (in both academia and industry) against a host of disease-relevant targets.
Further Information:
Contact:
- Matthew Todd @mattoddchem
- Aled Edwards @aledmedwards