2023

IPI Surfacing

An IPI symposium on cell surface receptor biology and protein science

Thursday, June 15, 2023 ––– Joseph B. Martin Conference Center
at Harvard Medical School

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The program

Symposium talks

Panel

The promise of synthetic antibodies and the challenges to universal access

A discussion on the biomedical applications of synthetic antibodies, barriers to competing with animal-derived antibodies and universal access to quality protein tools within the research community.

A gift from our founder

IPI Surfacing marked the celebration of a recent $210 million gift from IPI co-founder Tim Springer and the Springer family, which enables the Institute to make a lasting impact on biomedical research.

Hear what inspired Springer, a Harvard professor and veteran entrepreneur, to pursue bioscience, how he came to found IPI and why it’s essential to support basic protein science.

Posters

Fine-tuning yeast surface display selection for efficient antibody discovery
Automated and high-throughput antibody production, validation and characterization at the Institute for Protein Innovation (IPI)
Antibody development against μ-opioid receptor
High throughput kinetic characterization of synthetic recombinant antibodies for various cell surface receptor targets
Rational design of a next-generation synthetic Fab library for antibody discovery
High-throughput protein expression screening of synaptic cell surface protein families

Speakers

Featured speakers

All
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Stanford University

Christopher Garcia
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University of Oxford

Yvonne Jones
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Harvard Medical School

Debora Marks
University of Zurich

Andreas Plückthun
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Osaka University

Junichi Takagi
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Stanford University

Christopher Garcia

K. Christopher Garcia, Ph.D., is a professor of molecular and cellular physiology and of structural biology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is also an investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The Garcia laboratory investigates structural and functional aspects of cell surface receptor recognition and activation in receptor-ligand systems. The lab uses structural information on receptor-ligand complexes to engineer variant proteins and surrogates to manipulate receptor signaling and cellular function, with an eye towards therapeutic applications.

Garcia has founded or co-founded several biotech companies, including Synthekine, Surrozen, 3T Biosciences and ALX Oncology, that are attempting to clinically develop technologies from his lab. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and the National Academy of Medicine in 2016.

Headshot of woman smiling in front of bookshelves

University of Oxford

Yvonne Jones

Yvonne Jones, Ph.D., holds the Sir Andrew McMichael Professorship of Structural Immunology at the University of Oxford. Her research group investigates human cell signaling mechanisms and has provided fundamental insights into signaling systems important to cellular immunology, developmental biology and cancer.

Jones completed her doctorate at Oxford’s Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics and learned protein crystallography during her postdoctoral training. In 1989, she reported the three-dimensional structure of tumor necrosis factor, which launched her interest in cell signaling.

She co-founded the Division of Structural Biology (STRUBI) at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine (NDM) in 1999 and was a Cancer Research UK Principal Research Fellow from 2001-2011. Currently, she is the co-head of STRUBI, the deputy head of the NDM, a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization and a fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Learned Society of Wales.

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Harvard Medical School

Debora Marks

Debora Marks, Ph.D., is a world-leading computational biologist with a focus on developing new artificial intelligence methods to accelerate biotherapeutic discovery. Currently, she is an associate professor of systems biology at Harvard University, focused on viral genome forecasting and immune response.

Marks received the International Society for Computational Biology Overton Prize for outstanding accomplishment in the field of computational biology in 2016, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Ben Barres Early Career Acceleration Award in the Neurodegeneration Challenge Design in 2018 and an NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award for antibody design in 2020.

University of Zurich

Andreas Plückthun

Andreas Plückthun, Ph.D., has been a professor of biochemistry at the University of Zürich since 1993. His interdisciplinary protein engineering lab has made important contributions in antibody engineering, scaffold engineering, directed evolution, GPCR engineering and targeted gene delivery.

Plückthun developed the first antibody expression in E. coli and the first fully synthetic antibody library. He’s developed repeat proteins as alternative scaffolds; ribosome display as an in vitro protein evolution method; directed evolution methods for stabilizing GPCRs; and a system of virus-like particles to deliver DNA to selected cells in the body.

He has been an inventor on more than 25 patent families and is co-founder of four companies: Morphosys AG, Molecular Partners AG, G7 Therapeutics and Vector BioPharma. He has written over 500 publications which have been cited over 50,000 times and received numerous awards, including the 2016 Christian-Anfinsen Award of the Protein Society.

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Osaka University

Junichi Takagi

Junichi Takagi, Ph.D. is a professor in the Laboratory for Protein Synthesis and Expression at the Institute for Protein Research of Osaka University, Japan. His research interest concerns structural and functional analyses on receptor-ligand interactions, particularly in the field of immunology and neuroscience.

Takagi’s expertise is in the structural study of receptor ectodomains and extracellular proteins using both X-ray crystallography and electron microscopy. He has conducted numerous studies aimed at elucidating the mechanisms of cell signaling by using structural information. Additionally, he is also engaged in technology developments related to high-quality protein production and purification, as well as structure-based protein and antibody engineering.

Panel speakers

All
Alloy Therapeutics

Errik Anderson
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University of Toronto & SGC

Aled Edwards
Harvard Medical School

Andrew Kruse
Institute for Protein Innovation

Rob Meijers
University of Zurich

Andreas Plückthun
Woman smiling in Addgene t-shirt.
Addgene

Meghan Rego

Alloy Therapeutics

Errik Anderson

Errik Anderson, MBA, is a bioengineer, entrepreneur and investor who has launched seven venture-backed biotech companies in the last 20 years, including Alloy Therapeutics, Adimab, Compass Therapeutics, Alector, Arsanis and Avitide.

Anderson first worked in venture capital at Lehman Brothers Venture Capital and in marketing at Bristol-Myers Squibb. After earning his bachelor’s degree in economics at Dartmouth College, he studied bioengineering and business as a graduate student at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering and the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration. He graduated as a Tuck Scholar for outstanding academic achievement and is currently a member of Tuck’s board of advisors.

Currently, Anderson is CEO of Alloy Therapeutics and the founder and CEO of Ulysses Diversified Holdings, which supports entrepreneurs building companies that make the world a better place. Anderson has also worked with and invested in teams in tech, fintech, consumer, software, alternative energy, health IT and health care services.

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University of Toronto & SGC

Aled Edwards

Aled Edwards, Ph.D., founded and leads the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), a public-private partnership in the biomedical research and pharmaceutical sector. The SGC generates research tools and knowledge to support basic science and early-stage drug discovery. Since 2004, the SGC has placed all its research output into the public domain without restriction, including without patents as a core principle. The SGC founded the YCharOS project, which is an open science reagent antibody characterization public-private partnership.

Edwards is also a professor and the Temerty Nexus Chair of Health Innovation and Technology at the University of Toronto. He has published over 200 papers and his teams have contributed over 4,500 structures to the Protein Data Bank as of 2021.

Harvard Medical School

Andrew Kruse

Andrew Kruse, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. His lab is focused on the study of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) and other transmembrane proteins. His team uses synthetic camelid antibodies, or nanobodies, as tools to study transmembrane signaling and has developed a nanobody library, now available for nonprofit research from Kerafast.

Alongside Timothy Springer, Kruse co-founded IPI in 2017 and Tectonic Therapeutic, three years later. He now serves on Tectonic’s board of directors.

Kruse earned his Ph.D. in structural biology under Brian Kobilka at Stanford University. He received an Amgen Young Investigator Award in 2019 and the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2017 for impactful early-career research.

Institute for Protein Innovation

Rob Meijers

Rob Meijers, Ph.D. is senior director of the Antibody Platform at the Institute for Protein Innovation (IPI). 

Meijers previously was a group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Hamburg, Germany, where he established a facility for protein preparation and characterization, one of the largest biophysical core facilities in Europe. At EMBL he also developed a research program to study immune and neuronal receptors — determining how the axon guidance protein netrin interacts with its canonical receptor DCC, and obtaining MHC class I protein structures that provided fundamental insights into peptide binding and exchange. 

At IPI, Meijers and his colleagues discover synthetic recombinant antibodies for cell surface receptors and their ligands, and collaborate with academic investigators who need antibody tools to answer fundamental biological questions.

University of Zurich

Andreas Plückthun

Andreas Plückthun, Ph.D., has been a professor of biochemistry at the University of Zürich since 1993. His interdisciplinary protein engineering lab has made important contributions in antibody engineering, scaffold engineering, directed evolution, GPCR engineering and targeted gene delivery.

Plückthun developed the first antibody expression in E. coli and the first fully synthetic antibody library. He’s developed repeat proteins as alternative scaffolds; ribosome display as an in vitro protein evolution method; directed evolution methods for stabilizing GPCRs; and a system of virus-like particles to deliver DNA to selected cells in the body.

He has been an inventor on more than 25 patent families and is co-founder of four companies: Morphosys AG, Molecular Partners AG, G7 Therapeutics and Vector BioPharma. He has written over 500 publications which have been cited over 50,000 times and received numerous awards, including the 2016 Christian-Anfinsen Award of the Protein Society.

Woman smiling in Addgene t-shirt.

Addgene

Meghan Rego

Meghan Rego, Ph.D. is the director of antibodies at Addgene. 

Rego received her Ph.D. from the University of Rhode Island, where she studied the molecular etiology of the cancer susceptibility syndrome Fanconi anemia. She then worked at a variety of biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies focused on therapeutic biologics. In 2016, she joined Addgene to help launch their viral vector service. In her current role as director of antibodies, Rego oversees Addgene’s recombinant antibody production and quality control platform.

IPI Surfacing highlights

  • Talks by world-class experts on cell surface signaling pathways
  • Panel discussion on the promise of synthetic antibodies and challenges to universal access
  • Posters presented by emerging biomedical researchers
  • Networking lunch and reception

IPI Surfacing was a free, one-day event focused on cell surface receptor biology and protein science. As a catalyst in protein science, IPI was thrilled to convene scientific leaders to amplify conversations at the forefront of bioscience.

Crowd listens to six researchers discuss antibody access and reproducibility on a small stage.
Two men talking in office building.
Man in suit speaks from podium with Institute for Protein Innovation banner.
Woman points to figure on scientific poster.
Two IPI employees read an IPI poster labeled, "High-throughput Protein Expression Screening of Synaptic Cell Surface Protein Families"
Woman asks a question into a microphone in a full auditorium at IPI Surfacing.
Megan Rego with arms crossed talking in small group in room surrounded by IPI Surfacing attendees.

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