DrPietro Sormanni

The lab specialises in protein and antibody design, working at the interface between computation and experiments.

Antibodies are key tools for addressing questions in biomedical research, are widely employed in diagnostics, and are increasingly used as therapeutics to treat many diseases, including cancer and neurodegeneration. Existing methods of antibody discovery and optimisation rely on the laboratory screening of large numbers of variants produced by library construction or by the immune system, which can be time-consuming and costly, and sometimes result in antibodies exhibiting suboptimal properties. Conversely, computational design can drastically reduce the time and costs of antibody discovery, and in principle allows for a highly controlled parallel screening of multiple biophysical properties. Moreover, rational design inherently allows the targeting of specific regions on the target protein (epitopes), which can be particularly daunting using available techniques but is very important for many therapeutic applications.