December 7, 2022
WEST LAFAYETTE, Indiana – Advancements in recombinant protein production and processing is empowering investigators at Purdue University to pursue new discovery efforts that will develop tomorrow’s therapeutics, vaccines, and diagnostic reagents. Using prokaryotic and eukaryotic expression host systems as bio-factories, recombinant proteins are produced for several of these applications in mammalian cells, bacteria, yeast, and insect cells.
The Molecular Evolution, Protein Engineering and Production (MEPEP) facility at Purdue specializes in protein expression, purification, and characterization, offering investigators the opportunity to take full advantage of the newest recombinant protein technologies as a discovery resource lab designed to serve the research community at Purdue University, partner institutions and organizations.
On October of 2022, the Purdue Institute of Inflammation, Immunology and Infectious Disease (PI4D), the Purdue Center for Cancer Research (PCCR), Purdue Institute for Integrative Neurosciences (PIIN), and the Purdue Institute for Drug Discovery (PIDD), created a partnership to form the Protein Engineering Partners Initiative (PEPI) in order to provide investigators with awards of up to $10,000 to utilize resources of the MEPEP facility. Investigators of the Purdue University, West Lafayette campus were invited to submit applications in one of three categories including cancer, neuroscience, and inflammation/immunology/infectious diseases and justify how their projects could benefit from access to the equipment and expertise of the MEPEP.
The winners of the 2022 PEPI competition are:
Cancer
Marxa Figueiredo – Department of Basic Medical Sciences - Engineering a PASylated Flex27 platform for bone metastatic prostate cancer.
Neuroscience
Gregory Hockerman – Department of Medicinal Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology - Developing Novel Ligands for voltage-gated Ca2+ channel beta 3 subunits.
Inflammation/Immunology/Infectious Disease
Angeline Lyon – Department of Chemistry - Expression and Purification of the Gbetagamma Heterodimer for Structural Studies.
For more information about the PEPI competition, please contact Tommy Sors (tsors@purdue.edu).
