Designing and developing therapeutic proteins with Jumi Shin 

In this Expert Perspective, Jumi Shin of the University of Toronto discusses her transdisciplinary work designing and developing peptide therapeutics. Jumi also provides an overview of the research being undertaken at her lab and outlines her hopes where this work may lead.

About the author:

Jumi Shin grew up in Reno, NV, and received an undergraduate degree from Harvard and PhD from Caltech in Peter Dervan’s lab. She undertook a postdoctoral fellowship in Don Hilvert’s lab at The Scripps Research Institute. Jumi was Assistant Professor of Chemistry, University of Pittsburgh before moving to the University of Toronto, and she has two children.

The multidisciplinary Shin lab focuses on exploiting the building blocks that nature uses, including proteins and nucleic acids, toward solving problems in human health and our environment and ecosystem. The work involves designing small proteins that bind to specific DNA targets toward regulation of gene expression, particularly those involved in cancer and disease. Protein structure and function is analyzed by various spectrosopic methods including fluorescence (FRET, anisotropy), circular dichroism and x-ray crystallography, as well as biological assays (yeast and bacterial one-hybrid) and testing in cancer cell lines and mouse models.