School of Informatics professor at IUPUI receives $1.1 million NIH grant
June 27, 2008
Yaoqi Zhou, director, bioinformatics graduate program, and professor, IU School of Informatics at IUPUI, has received a 4-year, $1.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for his research on "Statistical Energy Functions: a Fragment-based Approach."
Many chronic and fatal illnesses including Alzheimer's Disease, Cystic Fibrosis, and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (Mad Cow Disease) are caused by malfunctions of the “nanomachines” that we call proteins. Researchers have yet to discover the energy function that governs the function of these proteins.
Dr. Zhou’s research proposes to uncover this energy function by developing a fragment-based statistical approach. To do that, he’ll develop an innovative method that extracts the interaction energy function from the fragments of experimentally solved protein structures.
“Successful completion of this project should allow us to more accurately describe how proteins interact within itself, between each other and with other biologically active molecules,” said Zhou.
Because of this general inability to describe the interaction between proteins and potential drug candidates, it’s led to higher costs and a low rate of success for drug development. The NIH-funded energy function research promises to change that, explained Zhou.
