While they were both still at Nerio Therapeutics, Sergio Duron brought Sandy Madigan a promising paper from the laboratory of Lei Wang, a chemical biologist at the University of California, San Francisco. It described an unnatural amino acid that can turn a protein into a covalent binder.
“It was pretty clear to us both very early that this was a unique opportunity,” Madigan says. Long before Nerio was acquired by Boehringer Ingelheim, the multitasking serial entrepreneurs started their next project.
Congratulations to Lei Wang, PhD, for his successful technological breakthrough!