Innovative Approaches to Protein-protein Interaction Inhibition Seminar

Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) represent a large class of disease-relevant molecular targets where the binding interface is often challenging to target with a small molecule. In such cases, peptides sequences that mimic a key portion of the interacting protein interface provide an important alternative but are subject to a key limitation: once separate from the whole protein a short peptide sequence no longer retains its (bioactive) conformation. A means to tackle this issue for helical peptides is using a synthetic peptide ‘staple’ which locks the peptide sequence into a bioactive conformation.

The Barnard’s research is centred on developing chemical tools to understand and inhibit therapeutically significant protein-protein interactions. This work encompasses aspects of chemical biology, synthetic organic chemistry, peptide and protein chemistry, chemical proteomics and medicinal chemistry. The group is highly multidisciplinary in nature and we work in collaboration with groups at Imperial within Natural Science and Medicine and with other labs across the UK.