David Baker

Yes, so many of the grand challenges that I described in my 2019 talk, we've really made huge progress on and now gone beyond.

But I'll highlight one example.

I spoke about vaccines.

And during the pandemic, my colleague Neil King here at the Institute for Protein Design actually developed a vaccine for COVID, which is approved for use in humans.

It's the first de novo design medicine.

And he's well on his way to making advanced vaccines for many different viruses, including influenza.

Since 2019, as the methods we've developed have become more powerful, we've expanded the range of applications quite a bit more broadly.

For example, sustainability is a new emphasis.

So we're working on new proteins to break down plastic and other pollutants and polymers.

We're working on new ways to fix carbon and remove

methane from the atmosphere.

And we're working on green chemistry approaches to enable the synthesis creation of molecules without using toxic solvents and in much lower energy ways.

So the grand challenges seem very ambitious at the time, but as the methods have progressed and with all the brilliant people who have come here to work on solving them, we've actually been able to go well beyond now and tackle new problems as well.

One of the advances that we've made

since 2019 is in developing methods for designing proteins which can make or break chemical bonds.

This is something that happens in nature.

There are many proteins which do this, which catalyze chemical reactions.

And now that we've mastered that, that we can design proteins that will break bonds, problems like plastic degradation or breaking down other toxic compounds in the environment become really, they start to become things that can be approached.

And it's particularly interesting with compounds that

that weren't present during evolution, like forever chemicals, PFAS compounds, there was never any evolutionary pressure for nature to evolve proteins to break down such compounds.