Staff Scientist Kathryn Hastie of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) has won the 2017 William E. and Diane M. Spicer Young Investigator Award of Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, for her persistent work to reveal the Lassa virus glycoprotein structure. The Spicer Young Investigator Award is presented each year to a new investigator who has made significant technical or scientific contributions that are beneficial to the Lightsource community.
The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) has been awarded a five-year, $11.2 million grant from the National Institute for Allergic and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. The award is a continuation of support for a long-running, collaborative project to reveal the detailed workings of the mammalian immune system. The principal investigator for the project is Richard J. Ulevitch, a professor in TSRI’s Department of Immunology. The chief research collaborators are Alan A. Aderem of the Center for Infectious Disease Research in Seattle, Garry P. Nolan of Stanford University, and Bruce A. Beutler, who helped co-found the project while at TSRI but is now at the University of Texas Southwestern.
Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have invented a versatile method for identifying proteins that can feasibly be targeted with drugs to treat disease. Using the new method, published on July 31, 2017 in Nature Chemistry, the TSRI scientists from the Cravatt lab identified more than 100 human proteins that are likely to be targetable with small molecule, pill-based drugs. Some of these proteins already have been implicated in diseases such as cancer, but only a minority were previously known to be “druggable.”
Scientists in Floyed Romesberg’s lab have developed a highly efficient new method for making ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules in the laboratory. The method, described in the July 26 issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, works both for ordinary RNA and for several types of modified RNA. It has the potential to bring down dramatically the cost of producing RNA for scientific and pharmaceutical applications.