Energy Landscapes of Matrix Proteins from Influenza A Virus
October 1, 2023
DOHD ROTU won an Innovate UK Collaborative R&D grant for AIRA: AI-based Research Assistant for Active Site Structure and Dynamics from Energy Landscapes. The project brought DOHD ROTU together with the Wales group at the University of Cambridge and the Schnell group at the University of Oxford to integrate energy-landscape computation, cloud delivery, and AI assistance for biomolecular design and drug discovery.
The aim of this work was creation of a platform for discovering and analysing influenza drug-binding sites and epitopes, explaining and characterising binding mechanisms, and formulating the results so they can be tested experimentally with NMR and rapid prototyping. This made Influenza A a focused validation setting for a broader methodology: use energy landscapes to reason about protein structure and dynamics, then connect those models to design, interpretation, and experimental follow-up.
For DOHD ROTU, the project extended the company's energy-landscape approach to viral matrix proteins and helped connect scientific modelling, AI, and interactive research tooling. The longer-term ambition was not limited to influenza. After validation on influenza, the same methodology was intended to support small-molecule targeting of proteins in health and disease, protein therapeutics, and industrial enzyme design.
