Nicholas Polizzi, PhD

Nicholas Polizzi, PhD

Biography

Nicholas Polizzi, PhD

Dr. Nicholas Polizzi received his PhD from the Department of Biochemistry at Duke University in 2016, where he worked on theory and time-resolved spectroscopic measurements of biological and abiological electron-transfer reactions. Through this work, he became interested in de novo protein design and did his postdoctoral studies in the laboratory of Bill DeGrado at the University of California, San Francisco, where he focused on developing new approaches for the accurate design of proteins that bind to small molecules. In the summer of 2022, he will start as an Assistant Professor in the Cancer Biology Department at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Researcher

Physician

Assistant Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology

Research

    Dr. Polizzi is an Independent Investigator in the Department of Cancer Biology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and an Assistant Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. His interests are in developing and applying innovative machine-learning and artificial intelligence algorithms to discover and program molecular recognition of proteins for small-molecule ligands. Dr. Polizzi’s group has pioneered the computational protein-design method, COMBS, which enabled for the first time the de novo design of proteins that bind tightly and specifically to targeted small molecule drugs, without the need for random mutagenesis and library selections. To achieve a tight coupling of theory and experiment, Dr. Polizzi’s group consists of computational researchers and experimentalists: protein designers, machine learning and molecular dynamics experts, protein engineers, and structural biologists. The group builds proteins that not only hone design methods but also act as useful tools for biology, e.g., for metabolite sensing, drug delivery, and genetic-code expansion in mammalian cells. Ultimately, Dr. Polizzi's group hopes to crack the "ligand-binding code" to aid in the development of next-generation medicines and open the door to the design of functional proteins not seen in nature.

    Research Departments

    Locations

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    Dana–Farber Cancer Institute

    360 Longwood Ave LC 4312 Boston, MA 02115
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    Dana–Farber Cancer Institute

    Location Avtar

    Dana–Farber Cancer Institute

    360 Longwood Ave LC 4312 Boston, MA 02115
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    42.339, -71.1078

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