Laboratories

Medical Sciences Group/Inter-Institute Cooperative LaboratoriesHonda Laboratory
(Functional Biomolecules Engineering Group, AIST)

The excess of imports over exports of pharmaceutical products exceeds 2 trillion yen in Japan. Thus, most of national medical expenses finally flow abroad. This unfavorable balance of trade in medical economy must be solved so that such an expenditure leads, for example, new capital spending and creates the healthy employment. Therefore, the achievement of the armaceutical products with “Japanese flag”through the domestic innovation in drug development and manufacture,especially for biologics, is demanded among other things. Hence we aim at the construction of fundamental technologies to contribute to innovative development and manufacture for biologics, and push forward a research of protein engineering and synthetic biology with the both theoretical and experimental approaches.  As concrete subjects, we are conducting the following theme:analysis of the molecular evolution of proteins using a cross profiling method that is the computational technique developed by us, development of designing software for an artificial protein based on the energy landscape sampling, synthesis of artificial proteins with novel structure and high function by evolutional molecular engineering method,engineering yeast cells having a synthetic genetic circuit for drug development screening,analysis of the tolerance acquisition mechanism of drug-resistantgenes,development of the pharmacokinetics improvement technology of biologics, stabilization of pharmaceutical protein using post-translation modification mechanism, construction of the library for screening drug-like molecules having a non-immunoglobulin scaffold,and advancement of the quality control technology for biologics using the artificial affinity protein. Through these, we aim at the holistic understanding of biological system in association with evolution and the offer of valuable industrial applied seeds of engineering. We welcome every person who wants to spend his or her student life in the atmosphere of National Institute which is different from that of universities. Please refer to a homepage for the details.

Research
keywords
protein engineering, evolutional molecular engineering, synthetic biology, biologics, therapeutic proteins,
Page Top