Walls says she felt an overwhelming sense of focus: “It was like, ‘Okay, we know what to do,’” she says. Walls and biochemist David Veesler, the head of her lab at the University of Washington, stayed up all night analyzing it. On January 10, 2020, the genetic sequence for SARS-CoV-2 was released to the world. defense, I began by saying, ‘I’m about to tell you why this family of viruses has the potential to cause a pandemic, and we are not prepared for that pandemic.’ Unfortunately, that ended up coming true.”Īs soon as word of a mysterious new pneumonia trickled out of Wuhan, China, in late December 2019, Walls suspected a coronavirus. “For five years I’d been trying to convince people that coronaviruses were important,” she says. She completed her doctorate in coronavirus structure in December 2019, making her a member of what was at the time a very small club. Walls is at the forefront of this research. With these tools, we can use proteins to build nanobots that can engage infectious diseases in single-particle combat, or send signals throughout the body, or dismantle toxic molecules like tiny repo units, or harvest light. Scientists are now forging biochemical tools that could transform our world. Many experts assumed we never would.īut new insights and breakthroughs in artificial intelligence are coaxing, or forcing, proteins to give up their secrets. The complexity of those interactions is so great and the scale so small (the average cell contains 42 million proteins) that we have never been able to figure out the rules governing how they spontaneously and dependably contort from strings to things. Their origamilike shapes are governed by the order and number of the different aminos used to build them, which have distinct attractive and repellent forces. They are made of long strings of simpler molecules called amino acids, and they twist and fold into enormously complex 3-D structures. They digest food, fight invaders, repair damage, sense their surroundings, carry signals, exert force, help create thoughts, and replicate. Proteins are intricate nanomachines that perform most tasks in living things by constantly interacting with one another. It consisted of artificial microscopic proteins drawn up on a computer, and their creation marked the beginning of an extraordinary leap in our ability to redesign biology. Unlike any vaccine used before, the one Walls was developing was not derived from components found in nature. She hoped that her approach, if successful, might not only tame COVID but also revolutionize the field of vaccinology, putting us on a path to defeat infectious diseases from flu to HIV. Walls, a young structural biologist with expertise in coronaviruses, had spent the past three months working day and night to develop a new kind of vaccine against the pathogen ravaging the world. Late on a Friday night in April 2020, Lexi Walls was alone in her laboratory at the University of Washington, waiting nervously for the results of the most important experiment of her life.
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