Structural biology

I'm your host, Sam, and today I'm joined by Associate Professor David Jacques, a structural virologist at the School of Biomedical Sciences at UNSW.

David has spent much of his career studying the HIV capsid, and in this episode, we explore how fundamental structural biology can translate into medicine.

We talk about the discoveries that came from trying to understand how the HIV capsid works, how that fundamental science contributed to the development of a new HIV drug, and how those lessons are now shaping his team's work on another human retrovirus, HTLV.

Before we hear from David, I'd like to begin by acknowledging the country on which this conversation was recorded, on the unceded lands of the Bedegal and Wangal peoples.

[laughs]

I do know things about other proteins.

Um, and we have a s- you know, structural biology facility, all sorts of amazing, um, set up here at UNSW to interrogate protein, uh, you know, predict structures of protein with the new AI technologies.

All sorts of things we can do to enable your knowledge of, or to, to enable knowledge of a protein and expand that into, you know, potential drug development or whe- wherever you, maybe you want to make an antibody or something.

So that's, uh, my journey there.

I got interested in all the structural biology, protein-protein interaction, protein in small molecule, drug interaction.

And a lot of people there were working on a different project.

And we had an industry partner there as well, so it's a very good experience I had in Frankfurt.