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Asked by anon-196019 to Sebastian, Paddy, Lee, Jennifer, Fiona, Eleanor on 7 Mar 2019. This question was also asked by anon-196011, anon-196637, anon-196670.
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Sebastian Cosgrove answered on 7 Mar 2019:
Enzymes are natures catalysts, they have evolved over millions of years to be really good at doing certain chemical reactions. In my job we try and harness their power by using them to make important chemicals in more efficient ways then the man-made chemicals that are more frequently used. Enzymes sometimes however need to be genetically engineered to work well enough to produce drugs on a big scale. The woman who invented a lot of the ways we do enzyme engineering was awarded the Noble Prize in Chemistry last year, Prof Frances Arnold. Lots of her work underpins everything that people in my field work on.
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Lee Steinberg answered on 7 Mar 2019:
Recent developments in mathematics and computer science have made artificial intelligence and machine learning available to be performed on standard computers. This has led to a massive increase in the number of chemists who are able to apply these techniques to their work. So- the discoveries that led up to my work, probably the increase in processing power of computers, and the increase of the availability of simple libraries to write machine learning programs!
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Fiona Scott answered on 7 Mar 2019:
The discovery of a type of enzyme called a kinase has led to my work. We have about 518 different kinases in our bodies and their role is to tell the cell to do something, a bit like a set of traffic lights. Kinases turn different processes in our cells on and off.
A lot of kinases act weird in cancer cells – sometimes remaining permanently switched on or there are a higher number of them in cancer cells vs healthy cells which can lead to endlessly dividing cells i.e. cancer tumours growing. Because of this discovery, targeted drugs that shut down kinase enzymes have proven an effective way to treat cancer in a “selective manner” that doesn’t cause as many side effects.
I am working on one of these kinases that doesn’t currently have good molecules that shut it down. There are lots of people working on different kinases so we will hopefully have molecules for all of them one day to help us understand what each of them do because currently we don’t!
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