Description:

Parisa Hosseinzadeh, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Knight Campus Center for Accelerating Scientific Impact
The University of Oregon

Computational Modeling and Design of Peptides as Therapeutics

Despite great biomedical progress in the last century, our fight against diseases is not over yet. One challenge we face is that over 70% of disease targets can't be accessed through the commonly used therapeutic modalities (antibodies and small molecules); these targets are called undruggable. Peptides have been proposed as an alternative modality, complementary to antibodies and small molecules, that can access some of these undruggable targets and provide new solutions to some diseases. In this talk, I will go over our computational pipeline for designing cyclic peptides that can bind to protein targets of interest with high affinity and some successful and ongoing examples. I will also talk about some of our most recent work on tackling the challenge of predicting peptide permeability through the generation of a representative library of peptides for experimental testing.