Protein design of novel immunotherapeutic drugs

antibodies - gene therapy - vaccines - cellular therapies - peptides

Schoeder Lab

at Leipzig University, Medical Faculty, Institute for Drug Discovery

Our Research Interests

We use computational protein design including machine learning to design proteins with new functionalities. Through interchanging application of computational protein design and experimental validation, we design a new generation of protein drugs.  
The SNP2Prot Collaborative Research Center 1664 lead my Marcel Quint from University of Halle was funded by the German Research Foundation. We are excited to work with this exciting team. Looking forward to designing protein together with my project partner Sascha Laubinger to target the Dicer-like-1 protein in Arabidopsis thaliana.
Link to the homepage of SNP2PROT 
Great team effort! And congratulations to Sophia on her review on arenavirus being accepted in Incet. Genet. Evol.Link to the publication 
Wonderful conferences this spring in Vienna and Hannover!

Sophia, Tom and I presented our vaccine work at the GfV 2024 in Vienna and showed our recent succes in designing vaccines. 
Dieter, Sophia and I went to visit the Keystone HIV and (Re-) emerging viruses in Hannover two weeks later. Great talks - and catching up in the vaccine field!
Using the Evolutionary Scale Model (ESM) together with biopysical modeling in Rosetta. Now possible as we show in our most recent work in ACS Synthetic Biology!
Congratulations to Moritz for this amazing work!
Link to the publication 
Congratulations Johanna! 
Our work on assigning the protein backbone chemical shifts for mouse siderocalin in 3D biomolecular NMR experiments was accepted in Biomol. NMR Assign.! A big thanks to Max Kade Foundation for being the sponsor on Johanna's research stay at Vanderbilt University. 
Link to the publication 
Out now in PLoS Comp. Bio! Design of post-translational predictions (PTMs) using machine learning in Rosetta.
Moritz' new paper on the integration of machine learning models for PTM prediction is out now in PLoS Comp. Bio. It covers 19 possible PTMs to design. 
Go design your favorite PTM:Link to the publication  
Congratulations Abhi and Tom!
Abhi from the MHH spear-headed the effort on studying RBD-antibodies for SARS-CoV-2.  Turns out when produced as tetravalent antibody, they outperform the parent antibody. Tom joined the effort and modeled these interactions.
Great collaboration with the Schambach lab at the MHH in Hannover!
Link to publication 
The 3D-Bioinfo 3D-SIG, ICSB and ELIXIR meeting in Prague! 
Max, Johannes and Hannes joined me in visiting this outstanding meeting in a fantastic location. Just a train ride away in beautiful Prague. 
We discussed the current state of bioinformatics and explored a lot of new ressources. 
Thanks for the organizers for inviting me to speak about our protein design ideas!
Wonderful meeting in Brussel from the European Society for Gene and Cell Therapy! ESGCT2023!
Vivian and Johanna presented their work in a fantastic venue and explored new trends in gene and cell therapy. Johanna showed a poster on her work on scTv's - computationally deisgn and experimentally tested in our lab (cudos to Max Lingner and Victoria Most for helping with the project). 
Vivian presented her work on profiling the AAV2 humoral immune response and her quest to reliable B cell sorting for AAV2 positive cells. 
Great conference!
Welcome to the lab, Anna!Welcome back Vivian and Phillip!Looking forward to working with you on designing antibodies for AAV, new vaccines against paramxyoviruses and enzymes to make better drugs in the future!
All the best wishes for your PhD studies!
What a wonderful meeting!
Schoeder and Meiler Lab organized European RosettaCon in Leipzig, 25th-27th September 2023 (https://europeanrosettacon.org/
We thank the wonderful speakers for the great science: Charlotte Deane from Oxford University, Andrew Ward from Scripps Research, Roland Dunbrack from Philadelphia, Jeffrey J. Gray from Johns Hopkins, Bill Schief from Scripps Research, Tanja Kortemme from UCSF, Eric S. Fischer from Dana-Faber-Institute and many more. 
Special thanks go to my incredible team that helped with everything, especially Birke und Christina, and Christa Kühnelt from the Pharmecuetical Chemistry, Lukas von Bredow from the Tretbar/Meiler labs and the team of the Destille for hosting us!

Congratulations, Moritz! Beautiful co-authorship with the Büning lab on how AAV can evade the innate immune response. Great collaboration on the design of AAVs!Check the paper out now in Molecular Therapy - Methods & Clinical Development
Link to the paper 
Out now in Curr. Opin. Struct. Biol.!
Hannes' paper about the entanglement of evolution, dynamics and entropy in GPCRs!

Congratulations, Hannes!
Link to his paper 
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) funds computational vaccine design for emerging viral diseases in the Schoeder and Meiler Lab!
With this funding we will use our computational methods to design stable viral surface proteins compatible with mRNA platforms. We will use Rosetta and machine learning in protein design to stabilize viral surface proteins. 
Press release of the University of Leipzig 
ScaDS.AI Associate membership!
Thank you ScaDS.AI for accepting my application for an associate membership! 
We are looking forward to develop the next generation of protein design algorithms with you! Discussion exicting questions in AI and machine learning will benefit our work greatly!
Link to the press release: 
Finally out in Structure!
Woods et al. on modeling and predicition of deletion mutants using AlphaFold2 and Rosetta benchmarked on a small helical domain. So far, deletion mutants were rarely structurally resolved, but here we have been using biomolecular NMR for an assigned helical SAM domain to observe structural changes for deletion mutants. 
A great project that was a lot of fun with Hope Woods at Vanderbilt University!
Link to the paper 
Summer School of the European Society of Gene and Cell Therapy (ESGCT)!
Vivian went for the Summer School of the ESGCT in France and had a great time. Thank you to the organizer for this incredible opportunity to get kick-started into gene and cell therapy research!
Thanks for the great Keystone conference on Computational Design and Modeling of Biomoleculesin Banff!
We enjoyed this conference very much, got to know the latest news in the protein design field and presented our own research. On the left site Johannes presenting his poster on de novo protein likeness and some impressions from the venue!
It is such a great time in computational protein design.
Congratulation to Johannes Klier for finishing his Master thesis! 
Amazing work trying to define what makes  de novo proteins so special and whether we can identify proteins with similar properties in nature. Johannes will stay on and pursue his PhD thesis with us. All the best for your studies!
Congratulation Moritz to your new co-authorship!
Amazing study with our collaboration partners Nadja Meumann and Hildegard Buening from Medical Hospital Hannover on liver-targeting AAV2s

Link to the paper: Meumann et al. 

Funding of the lab

We thank RosettaCommons, the state of Saxony, the Faculty of Medicine of Leipzig University,  the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), the ScaDS.AI and the DAAD for their contributions to our research.

We are part of the SFB1423 "Structural Dynamics of GPCR Signaling". Check it out here:  research.uni-leipzig.de/sfb1423/ 

Contact

clara.schoeder[at]medizin.uni-leipzig.de

Leipzig University Medical FacultyInstitute for Drug DiscoveryLiebigstr. 19D-04103 Leipzig