Roman Jerala, a researcher at the Institute of Chemistry, has won his second advanced grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for a €2.5 million project that aims to develop new ways of regulating proteins that could be used for therapeutic purposes such as cancer immunotherapy.

Jerala, head of the Department of Synthetic Biology and Immunology at the Institute of Chemistry, is looking for new ways to regulate the functioning of proteins using artificial intelligence-based protein design and modular principles developed by his team as part of the project Regulation of protein function via insertions for response to biological, chemical and physical signals (PROFI).

Proteins play a key role in most biological processes, and by finding new ways to regulate them, Jerala plans to produce proteins that will be suitable for therapeutic purposes such as cancer immunotherapy, the institute said in a press release about the researcher's five-year project.

"The aim of the project is to introduce new properties into these proteins so that we can regulate their action by different chemical signals and also by mechanical force," Jerala said at a presentation on 16 September.

Mechanical regulation is important because the immune system's response is also based on mechanical forces. "The project thus envisages improving the immune system's response to therapeutic cells using mechanically responsive proteins," he explained.

They also want to allow temporal control of the proteins' action, which could further increase the effectiveness of cancer treatment.

The institute's director, Gregor Anderluh, described the new ERC grant awarded to Jerala as "a recognition of his excellent work as well as a recognition of the institute, which is among the world leaders in synthetic biology".

After mathematical physicist Tomaž Prosen and Jožef Stefan Institute researcher Matjaž Humar, Jerala has now become the third Slovenian researcher to win ERC grants for two projects.

This is the sixth ERC research project for the Institute of Chemistry.

The institute's department led by Jerala boasts a number of achievements in synthetic biology. These include modular designed protein structures, which was the focus of Jerala's first ERC project for established researchers, MaCChines, which concluded a few days ago.

In connection with his first project, he also obtained and carried out an ERC proof-of-concept project entitled CCEdit to improve genome editing methods. With this project, his research group is putting more emphasis on the transfer of advances for the treatment of rare diseases and for cancer immunotherapy, which the Centre for the Technologies of Gene and Cell Therapy, which is also being set up with EU funding, is focussing on, the institute said.

Earlier this month, researcher Tina Lebar, who started her career under Jerala's mentorship and is returning to his department from her post-doctoral studies at the Harvard University next year, won a €1.5 million starting ERC grant for a project dealing with the expansion of genome editing capabilities.