De novo designed miniproteins have big potential for therapeutic development
Chris Bahl
Chief Scientific Officer and Co-founder, AI Proteins
Miniproteins are a powerful yet underutilized therapeutic modality. They are only 30-90 amino acids in length, yet they adopt a folded tertiary structure like a much larger protein; this structure enables miniproteins to bind with high affinity and specificity to their targets. Miniproteins found in nature are very challenging to engineer to bind new targets. We solved this problem using computational de novo design, finally unlocking miniproteins for therapeutic development.
Chris Bahl is a protein designer, biochemist and structural biologist. Chris pioneered the ability to computationally design synthetic miniproteins de novo. He is the former Head of Protein Design at the Institute for Protein Innovation, Boston Children's Hospital, and Harvard Medical School. Today, Chris is the Chief Scientific Officer and Co-founder of AI Proteins, Inc. AI Proteins is leveraging the unique and powerful synthetic miniprotein modality to rapidly create novel therapeutics.