Beyond Pharma Panel Discussion
Mehmet Sarikaya
CSO, DMXi
This panel discussion looked at the use of peptides outside of the traditional pharmaceutical landscape. This provided an opportunity to understand, discuss, challenges and opportunities and how they compare with human pharmaceutical applications.
Mehmet is the lead originator of Molecular Biomimetics, fledging interdisciplinary field where peptides are used as fundamental building blocks in materials and life-sciences and technologies. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1982, Mehmet was an instructor in the Mater Sci and Eng Dept and a Researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He started his professorships at the University of Washington in 1984, raised through the ranks to full professorship in Mater Sci and Eng., and adjunct prof in Chem Eng and Oral Health Sciences. He established the first election microscopy facilities at UW and Princeton, where he was a visiting prof, in which capacity he also served at Nagoya University (ECOTOPIA Institute Professor), JP, and Bilkent University, TR. Building upon his MSE foundations, in which processing-structure-function relationships are the key in materials science and engineering, his research has been focusing on learning lessons from biology at the molecular scale, with emphasis in peptide enabled science and technology, where genetically selected and engineered peptides are used as the key enablers in practical engineering and medical/dental technologies, just like proteins are used as the key enablers of life's functions in biology. He established one of the 16 competitive DURINT multidisciplinary Centers at the UW as well as the first MRSEC (titled GEMSEC, Genetically Engineered Materials Science and Engineering Center) through NSF's highly prestigious Materials Research Science and Engineering Center program, and received Phase-I and Phase-II Materials Genome Initiative projects, again, from NSF in its DMREF program in one of the holy grail topics in all of science, i.e., seamlessly integrating biology and solid state devices, where ML/AI plays the key role in an exclusive convergent science and technology approach with genetics and molecular biology fields integrated into materials science and engineering. Through a natural evolution process, his current R&D focus is to create peptide-guided practical dental technologies (eventually towards personalized health care), the role of water in molecular recognition and signal transaction in hybrid molecular systems, and genetically designed biology-inspired hardware and software platforms that mimic biological brain(s).