▎WuXi AppTec Content Team Editor
A few days ago, the C&EN website under the American Chemical Society (ACS) announced the 2022 C&EN Talented 12. These talents, selected from a pool of more than 400 candidates, are still in the early stages of their careers, but have already launched several ambitious projects, such as deciphering the human genome and turning carbon dioxide into buildings Materials, discovery of inhibitors targeting non-drugable targets… In today’s article, WuXi AppTec’s content team will introduce readers to how these future “supernovas” in the chemical world can use chemistry to make the world a better place.
Weixue Wang, 37
Scorpion Therapeutics
Dr. Wang made his first foray into the biopharmaceutical industry in 2015 when he joined Janssen to design biochemical and biophysical assays for early drug discovery. They were the basis for early high-throughput screening. At Janssen, Dr. Wang developed a method for screening protein kinases. Traditional assays look for compounds that bind to activated kinases, however, there are more than 500 different protein kinases in the human body, and their kinase protein domains are structurally very similar in the activated state, making it difficult to find specific inhibitors.
Dr. Wang has developed a screening method to find compounds that bind to inactive kinases and prevent them from transitioning to an active state. This assay could allow researchers to find inhibitors that bind to inactive kinases.
2021. Dr. Wang came to Scorpion Therapeutics to help discover inhibitors against protein targets historically considered “undruggable”. The company is committed to developing a new generation of targeted anti-cancer therapies. Its president of strategy and business development, Dr. Adam Friedman, mentioned at the 2022 WuXi AppTec Health Industry Forum held this year that at present, “less than 10% of patients can truly benefit from targeted therapy”, and there is still huge progress in the future. space. At Scorpion, Dr. Wang helped discover inhibitors specific for mutants of the PI3 kinase. The kinetic model he developed played a key role in the discovery of the inhibitor, which is now being tested in animal experiments, and took only 9 months.
Adeyemi Adeleye, 39
University of California, Irvine
Dr. Adeleye is an environmental chemist at the University of California, Irvine. His team’s research workspans across the fields of chemistry, materials science, biology, agriculture, etc., aiming to design nanomaterials that can capture toxic arsenic in polluted soil without harming the animals and plants that need the soil to survive.
Excessive exposure to arsenic, which can lead to heart disease and cancer, is present in the soil of many countries around the world. Resolving arsenic contamination is challenging because it is a metalloid that cannot be broken down like organic contaminants.
Dr. Adeleye’s team’s strategy was to design iron- and sulfur-based nanoparticles that could adsorb arsenic, preventing it from being ingested by plants and animals in the water. Research by Dr. Adeleye’s team has shown that lettuce grown in soil treated with the nanoparticles is not affected by the toxicity of arsenic and can grow healthily. Whether these lettuces are safe to eat still needs further experiments to confirm.
Abigail Dommer, 30
University of California, San Diego
Dr. Dommer is a postdoc in the laboratory of Professor Rommie Amaro at the University of California, San Diego. Her specialty is modeling aerosols at the molecular level using supercomputers. After the Covid-19 outbreak, she used this expertise to build a model that simulates the entire SARS-CoV-2 capsid protein at the atomic level, containing 305 million atoms. This model provides many new insights into the interaction between the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and the ACE2 receptor. This achievement earned the team the ACM Gordon Bell Award, also known by some as the Nobel Prize in supercomputing.
Her recent research has successfully modeled the shape of the new coronavirus inside aerosols, which involves interactions between more than a billion atoms. It provides unprecedented detail for studying the airborne transmission of the virus.
Maher El-Kady, 39
Nanotech Energy
Dr. El-Kady discovered a way to generate graphene using a laser while doing his Ph.D. The resulting graphene has a unique three-dimensional structure that makes it a very good electrical conductor and capacitor. Based on this technology, he co-founded Nanotech Energy, one of the main directions of which is to use graphene materials to develop safer high-performance lithium batteries that will not catch fire due to short circuits or other reasons.
Dr. El-Kady is also a prolific scientist who has published more than 45 papers and is a co-author on 17 US and international patents.
Gabe Gomes, 33
Florida State University
The goal of Dr. Gomes’ lab is to teach computers the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, allowing them to automatically design new catalysts and chemical reactions through machine learning. The traditional approach to developing new catalysts is to modify the structure of existing catalysts until the desired reactivity is obtained. But this process can be inefficient and lengthy.
The goal of the Gomes team is to enable algorithms to design entirely new catalysts from the ground up. “You just tell me the properties of the material you want and I’ll give you the structure (of the catalyst),” Dr Gomes said. His team’s strategy for training computers is to treat compounds as three-dimensional quantum objects, breaking down each molecule into its most basic physical features.
This project could have far-reaching implications, including the discovery of new chemical reactions for green chemistry and the design of a new generation of climate-resistant materials.
Ming Joo Koh, 35
National University of Singapore
Rare metal catalysts are the type of catalyst commonly used in organic chemical synthesis, but they are scarce and expensive. Dr. Ming Joo Koh’s goal is to discover more efficient and lower cost catalysts.
One of the main research directions of his laboratory at the National University of Singapore is the development of catalysts using non-rare metals, mainly iron and nickel. A recently published study by his group describes a nickel catalyst with enhanced catalytic functions. Dr. Koh’s research in developing iron-based catalysts has also attracted the attention of researchers at pharmaceutical companies such as Bristol-Myers Squibb.
Alexis Komor, 34
University of California, San Diego
Dr. Komor co-developed the first DNA base editor when he was a postdoc in the lab of pioneer base editing pioneer Dr. David Liu. A single base in the genome is precisely replaced with another base. The single base editing therapy developed based on this technology has recently entered the clinical development stage.
At the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Komor’s goal is to use single-base editing to study the disease impact of mutations in the cellular DNA repair machinery. Her team introduced mutations into DNA and then observed how cells responded to changes in the DNA sequence. Looking ahead, Dr. Komor said that while the Human Genome Project has discovered many variations in the genome, we don’t understand the consequences of more than 99 percent of the variations, and she is committed to better understanding the functions of these variations.
Cate Levey, 31
Blue Planet Systems
Ms. Cate Levey worked for Impossible Foods for over 7 years after earning a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, where she helped turn plant-derived protein into artificial meat, and in 2016 Launched meat-based hamburgers.
After leaving Impossible Foods, Ms. Levey sought to tackle bigger challenges. Climate change is a major ecological challenge facing the world, and Ms. Levey hopes to use carbon capture technology that converts carbon dioxide into solid crystals to solve the problem of climate change. She joined Blue Planet Systems to study the use of different crystal types of calcium carbonate to capture carbon dioxide and generate solid materials. These materials can be utilized as components of cement.
Bichlien Nguyen, 34
Microsoft Corporate Research
The circuit boards in a computer are green in color, but the process by which they are created is not environmentally friendly. Often they require materials that are difficult to mine, and the synthesis process requires a lot of energy.
Dr. Nguyen is committed to changing that. She is a research scientist at Microsoft Corporation, initially involved in developing methods for storing digitized data in DNA molecules, a technology that could provide a stable, high-density mode of data backup. Her work allows researchers to write 1 megabyte of data into DNA in one second.
Now she works to improve the recyclability of electronic components. Working with other team members, she has created a mouse made from a biodegradable circuit board. The results were eventually brought together into the Zerix project, which aims to develop materials with zero environmental impact for the IT industry through multidisciplinary collaboration.
David Romney, 35
Aralez Bio
Dr. David Romney succeeded in generating a new TrpB enzyme through directed evolution when he was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Prof. Frances Arnold, which can generate tryptophan derivatives more efficiently . This is the raw material used by many biopharmaceutical companies to synthesize therapeutic peptides and other drug candidates.
Dr. David Romney co-founded Aralez Bio in 2019 with Prof. Frances Arnold and Dr. Christina Boville, whose enzyme-catalyzed production process not only reduces the time it takes for the pharmaceutical industry to produce compounds Months are reduced to days, and waste can be reduced by up to 99%, and energy consumption can be cut in half.
Helen Tran, 34
University of Toronto
Dr. Tran’s research team at the University of Toronto is working to develop innovative materials, including polypeptide-like polymers known as “peptoids” capable of self-assembly into nanomaterials. Her lab is also making polymers based on crops and other sustainable feedstocks. Their goal is to use these innovative materials to fabricate polymer semiconductor devices that can fold or twist. They could one day be used in sensors implanted in the human body. Since these materials are biodegradable, they do not add plastic pollution.
Alexandra Velian, 36
University of Washington
The work of Dr. Alexandra Velian’s team at the University of Washington focuses on the precise synthesis of inorganic nanomaterials at the atomic level. These materials can sense molecules present in their surroundings and change accordingly. For example, catalysts created from this material can change their chemical function by binding to a specific molecule at an active site.