On March 10th, for the Institute of Cancer Research Seminar series, Associate Professor Chris Tan from Department of Chemistry at SUSTECH gave a talk on his latest innovations on profiling intracellular protein-protein and protein-small molecule interactions through cellular biophysical methods.

Professor Tan described his recent innovations to thermal proteome profiling (or MS-CETSA), increasing the efficiency and accuracy of the technique for profiling protein-protein and protein-small molecule interactions. This technique is highly valuable for the drug discovery field, where characterization of on-target and off-target effects is crucial to understand drug mechanisms. He also described improvement in thermal proximity co-aggregation for profiling dynamics of proteome-wide protein-protein interactions in response to various biological processes and perturbations.

Professor Tan has developed several innovations that increase the throughput of protein biophysical profiling, with efforts made to speed up sample processing, to reduce the amount of sample required, to identify optimal statistical methods, and to apply different protein stability perturbation methods. He is currently applying his methods to characterize the protein targets of 1,000 FDA approved drugs. His innovative techniques will revolutionize the way we study intracellular protein interactions, and SZBL looks forward to more collaborations with Professor Tan.