L ate on a Friday night in April 2020, Lexi Walls was alone in her laboratory at the University of Washington, waiting nervously for the results of th

Artificial Proteins Never Seen in the Natural World Are Becoming New COVID Vaccines and Medicines

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2021-06-23 01:00:05

L ate on a Friday night in April 2020, Lexi Walls was alone in her laboratory at the University of Washington, waiting nervously for the results of the most important experiment of her life. Walls, a young structural biologist with expertise in coronaviruses, had spent the past three months working day and night to develop a new kind of vaccine against the pathogen ravaging the world. She hoped that her approach, if successful, might not only tame COVID but also revolutionize the field of vaccinology, putting us on a path to defeat infectious diseases from flu to HIV. Unlike any vaccine used before, the vaccine Walls was developing was not derived from components found in nature. It consisted of artificial microscopic proteins drawn up on a computer, and their creation marked the beginning of an extraordinary leap in our ability to redesign biology.

Proteins are intricate nanomachines that perform most tasks in living things by constantly interacting with one another. They digest food, fight invaders, repair damage, sense their surroundings, carry signals, exert force, help create thoughts, and replicate. They are made of long strings of simpler molecules called amino acids, and they twist and fold into enormously complex 3-D structures. Their origamilike shapes are governed by the order and number of the different aminos used to build them, which have distinct attractive and repellent forces. The complexity of those interactions is so great and the scale so small (the average cell contains 42 million proteins) that we have never been able to figure out the rules governing how they spontaneously and dependably contort from strings to things. Many experts assumed we never would.

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