CASE STUDY MAY 2019 THE BAKER LAB AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON Designing Proteins to Revolutionize BiotechnologyRecently, Baker Lab received a $45 million grant from the Audacious Project, a funding consortium, to pursue several computational design projects, including a flu vaccine capable of providing lifetime immunization, advanced protein containers for targeted gene delivery, and smart proteins capable of identifying cancerous or otherwise unhealthy cells. Despite these advances in protein design, progress has been difficult because the majority of designed protein sequences fail to fold or don’t function as designed. The computer models used for protein design produce many “false positives” (sequences that look good on the computer but fail in the lab), and understanding

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