SciLifeLab Fellows Jens Carlsson and Lucie Delemotte have been awarded 28,000,000 SEK to identify differences and similarities between specific receptors, which in the long term could lead to the development of new drugs that are more precise and has less side effects.

“When we know how these molecular machines work at the atomic level, we will be able to create a new receptor that recognizes a different molecule. That would be the ultimate confirmation that we really understand this. In the future, such receptors could potentially be used in gene therapy”.

This says Jens Carlsson (SciLifeLab/Uppsala Universitet), who together with Lucie Delemotte (SciLifeLab/KTH Royal Institute of Technology) will receive 28,000,000 SEK from Knut och Alice Wallenbergs Stiftelse for their project ‘molecular evolution and design of G protein-coupled receptors with tailored ligand specificity’.

“It will be exciting to transform findings about the evolution of receptor specificity into the design of molecular machines capable of treating Parkinson, starting with computer modeling and all the way to in vivo assays within the same project”, says Lucie Delemotte.

Read more (in Swedish) at Knut och Alice Wallenbergs Stiftelse.