About the Speaker
Basile Wicky is currently assistant professor for Biomolecular Design at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zurich, where his group works on developing and deploying methods in protein design for application in synthetic biology and cellular engineering. He was previously a postdoc with David Baker (University of Washington), and did his PhD in molecular biophysics at the University of Cambridge.
Talk Abstract
Recent advances in de novo protein design are transforming biology into an increasingly generative discipline. Fueled by progress in machine learning, we can now generate novel proteins in silico with increasing precision—expanding the design space beyond what evolution has explored. In the first part of my talk, I will describe how protein structure prediction networks, originally built for inference, can be re-purposed as generative models through strategies like hallucination. Beyond generating isolated proteins, we are now exploring how to compose them into functional systems. I will share recent work where we use designed protein networks to implement Boolean logic directly in mammalian cells. Looking forward, we envision extending this approach toward in situ cellular classification at the molecular level—treating designed proteins as modular building blocks for biological computation. These developments point to the potential of generative protein models as a new way to interact with and program biological systems.
We are looking forward to the talk!