Professor Bruno Correia

Talk: AI-driven design of protein components for synthetic biology

Finely orchestrated protein activities are at the heart of the most fundamental cellular processes. The rational and structure-based design of novel functional proteins holds the promise to revolutionize many important aspects in biology, medicine and biotechnology. Computational protein design has led the way in rational protein engineering, however many of the designed proteins have been solely focused on structural accuracy and are completely impaired of function.

I will present my group’s efforts on the development of novel computational approaches to predict and design protein function. Specifically, I will describe a new methodological framework to learn surface patterns displayed in protein structures that can be used to decipher their interactions with other molecules. I will also present a computational strategy to explore de novo protein topologies, aiming to solve prevalent problems in protein design that relate to the lack of optimal structural templates for the design of function. By expanding beyond the known protein structural space, our approaches present new paradigms for the rational design of functional proteins. I will showcase important applications for our computationally designed proteins in the domains of T cell-based therapies, biosensors and synthetic biology. Ultimately, I anticipate that our research will lead to further improvements in the understanding of protein function and design.

About this speaker

Throughout his PhD and postdoctoral studies, Bruno Correia was trained in world-renowned laboratories and institutions in the USA (University of Washington and The Scripps Research Institute). Very early in his scientific career, he had a fascination for protein structure and function.

His PhD studies evolved in the direction of immunogen design and vaccine engineering which sparked his interest in the many needs and opportunities in vaccinology and translational research. His efforts resulted in an enlightening piece of work where for the first time, computationally designed immunogens elicited potent neutralising antibodies.

During his postdoctoral studies, he joined a Chemical Biology Laboratory at The Scripps Research Institute, where he developed novel chemoproteomics methods for identifying protein-small molecule interaction sites in complex proteomes.

In 2015, he joined the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) – Switzerland as a tenure track assistant professor. The focus of his research group is to develop computational tools for protein design with particular emphasis in applying these strategies to immunoengineering (e.g. vaccine and cancer immunotherapy).

The activities in his laboratory focus on the development of computational design methods and the experimental characterisation of the designed proteins. His laboratory has been awarded 2 prestigious research grants from the European Research Council. He was awarded the prize for Best Teacher of Life Sciences in 2019.