Biomolecular Engineering Lab

Welcome to the Biomolecular Engineering Lab at Stevens Institute of Technology.

Principal Investigator: Assistant Professor Pin-Kuang Lai

Our group is dedicated to tackling the challenges of biological drugs design and development by using machine learning, molecular dynamics simulation, coarse-grained simulation, fluid mechanics, and high-throughput screening.

Our lab is focusing on the areas of antimicrobial resistance, device infection and drug developability.

Research

My research is dedicated to tackling the challenges of drug design and development by using machine learning, molecular dynamics simulation, coarse-grained simulation, fluid mechanics, and high-throughput screening. In particular, our lab focuses on antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) and antibodies.

Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) have been used as therapeutic drugs for over 30 years. One of the outstanding issues of antibody drug is the poor stability of some drug candidates such as high aggregation, elevated viscosity and low solubility. This hinders the development of new antibodies. The production cost of antibodies is high, therefore developing computational tools that can predict antibody stability in the early-stage discovery is desired.

The emergence of antimicrobial resistance is a crucial public health problem due to the dissemination of bacterial strains that are resistant to multiple antibiotic drugs. AMPs are promising alternatives to traditional antibiotics. One of the most desirable advantages of AMPs is that bacterial resistance would evolve much more slowly than against antibiotics.

However, AMPs can exhibit undesirable properties as drugs, including short circulating half-life, instability and toxicity to animals and humans. Therefore, novel approaches are needed to be developed to make AMPs less toxic for human while maintaining or improving their potency to eliminate bacteria and reduce the production cost.