Jacob A
- Research Program Mentor
MD/PhD Doctor of Medicine and of Philosophy candidate
Expertise
Structural Biology, Cryo-EM, Cryo-ET, Ligand Docking, Chemical Biology, Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, In Silico Screening
Project ideas
SARS-COVID-19 Protease Inhibitors
Since the pandemic began, a race was on to find inhibitors of the main protease of conornavirus. Several structures of the protease have been solved with fragments in the active site. Beginning with a literature review on proteases, one could look at the cornavirus proteases (MERS, SARS, SARS-COVID-19) for structural differences. Analysis of the fragments bound to the crystal structures of SARS-COVID-19 protease may inform future rational efforts for protease inhibitor design.
CAR-T Targets
CAR-T cells are cells engineered to identify cancer cells and, through several mechanisms, lead to decreased cancer burden. Reviewing the mechanism of CAR-T cells and technology developments, we can propose a new CART-T cell target antigen and describe its process of research, development, and manufacture.
Processing Available Cryo-EM Data
There are many open source datasets of images available that have been used to determine atomic structures of particles. A general idea might be to reprocess this data with different techniques/software to answer questions that have not yet been answered. This would be computationally expensive. Likely will require access to a computer with a strong GPU.