Avalon GloboCare Corp. announced a new study applying artificial intelligence (AI) enhanced protein design QTY Code technology. The method is expected to accelerate development of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies to treat cancer.

The research demonstrates a novel method for quickly predicting the design of so-called water-loving or hydrophilic variant structures of the 14 glucose transport membrane proteins in cells, which allows researchers to study the proteins more easily in water. Glucose transport membrane proteins are deregulated in many tumor types and are a potentially important target for cancer therapy. The study was published on June 27, 2022, in QRB Discovery, a peer-reviewed, research journal of biological function, structure and mechanism.

The QTY Code breakthrough technology, developed by Avalon and the laboratory of Dr. Shuguang Zhang, Ph.D., of MIT's Media lab in Boston, MA, is a protein-design platform that can turn water-insoluble transmembrane receptor proteins into water-soluble proteins, enabling their use in many clinical applications, including drug development. A team of scientists led by Dr. Zhang applied the QTY code to the 14 glucose transport membrane proteins that transport sugar to cells. They used Google's AlphaFold2, a DeepMind AI program, which can accurately and quickly predict how proteins fold.

Dr. Zhang and his team used the QTY code with the open-source AlphaFold2 to predict the structures of these proteins in both their natural hydrophobic shapes and their QTY-code altered water-soluble shapes. Authors of the QRB Discovery paper include Dr. Zhang and Eva Smorodina, an undergraduate intern-student in structural biology in the Greiff Lab at the University of Oslo; Drs. Fei Tao and Rui Qing of the Shanghai Jiaotong University (Dr. Qing was previously a postdoctoral researcher in the MIT Media Lab and later a research scientist at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT); Dr. Steve Yang, an MIT alumnus and now at PT Metiska Farma in Indonesia; and Dr. David Jin, M.D., Ph.D. of Avalon GloboCare Corp., whose collaboration helped drive Dr. Zhang's research in applying the QTY code to the study of cancer cells.

Avalon GloboCare funded the research.