Submitted by D.P. Juan on Mon, 23/02/2026 - 13:22
A team of scientists led by Dr Paul Miller and Professor Laura Itzhaki in the Department of Pharmacology has been awarded a £1.2 million Expand and Extend Award to continue their work on the MAST Engineering Biology Mission Award. The funds from UKRI BBSRC will strengthen and prolong the remit of the Modular Activator and Silencer Therapeutics (MAST) platform that is being developed. The team is led by PIs in the Department of Pharmacology (Dr Paul Miller, Prof Laura Itzhaki, Dr Cathy Wilson, Prof Mark Howarth), Department of Biochemistry (Prof Florian Holfelder), and the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College (Dr Pietro Sormanni). The funds will see the MAST initiative continue to develop and reach fruition by early-mid March 2027. The aims of the MAST programme include the development of three therapeutic platforms that can be used to generate new forms of antibody, degrader or protease protein biologics to study and treat disease.
Antibody therapeutics represent the most successful innovation in drug treatment in the past 20 years, and this computationally developed platform is anticipated to yield stable, effective binders for next-generation drug discovery. The degrader and protease platforms represent new emerging technologies for biologics to silence harmful disease-causing proteins by degrading or digesting them and should present new opportunities to facilitate research labs and companies to generate these new types of therapeutic leads. These platforms will be made widely accessible and will also be available through the newly established Cambridge Protein Screening Facility (CamPSF) in the Department of Pharmacology.