Inlay

chemical/synthetic biologist, Luddite trying to find better ways to make molecules that do important stuff, dad, @uchicago professor of chemistry http://www.dickinsonlab.uchicago.edu/

Nice article about Josh and Matt and their work together on this paper. Uchicago undergrads are very special! chemistry.uchicago.edu/news/new-uch...

Wow - what a lineup for the SMART Symposium on the Expanding Genetic Code and Beyond & GCE Workshop in Shenzhen!!! If you are in China definitely this is the conference to attend this Fall! symposia.smart.org.cn/sym/event/Fu...

Our more recent paper is hot off the press in @jacs.acspublications.org Great team effort and a preview of what the future looks like for our group.... pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

This work is now out at @pnas.org In drug discovery it’s often said selectivity is key - and here is a solution! Our PANCS platforms continue to expand! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

See our thoughts and overview on the field of binder discovery! Also it has a bit of an update on some of our own work pushing to new directions www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

See our recent review on proximity chemistry to study RNA biology. If you are interested in getting into the field, this is an easy way to get caught up on the chemistry and technology: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

NEW: They Got the Best NIH Scores of Their Careers. A Year Later, They Still Don’t Have Funding. As the NIH bankrolls new research at a significantly slower-than-usual pace, I talked to scientists left in the lurch about the toll on their research and careers: www.chronicle.com/article/they...

The leadership and clarity of @MIT President Sally Kornbluth www.bostonglobe.com/2026/05/26/o...

Save the date! 🧪The EMBO Workshop on Chemical Biology returns to EMBL Heidelberg on 8–11 Sep 2026. Co-organisers: Bryan Dickinson (UChicago), Maja Köhn (Bonn), Edward Lemke (IMB), Xiao Wang (MIT). #ChemicalBiology #EMBOChemBio #EMBO #EMBL #SaveTheDate #Biotech #Science www.embl.org/about/info/c...

My lab’s next paper is out in JACS! Congrats to Taemin and Ching who discovered that Brønsted acids unlock mild interfacial catalytic halogen atom transfer at Ag electrodes! pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

symposia.smart.org.cn

Protein binders are fundamental tools in chemical biology, key components of biotechnologies, and the foundation of biologics-based medicines. However…

www.sciencedirect.com

RNAs preferentially localize across virtually every subcellular compartment, from membrane-bound organelles, membrane-less condensates and even the ce…

www.sciencedirect.com

The NIH’s spending on new medical research is significantly slower than in previous years, leaving confused scientists in the lurch.

At public and private universities across the country, high-impact science is being damaged and derailed.

How an innovative UChicago laboratory built a fast-moving platform to target "undruggable" cancer proteins and train the next generation of scientific leaders

chemistry.uchicago.edu

Developing molecules that selectively bind targets of interest remains a critical bottleneck in biological research and biotechnology. Here, we present a workflow that leverages the Phage-Assisted Non-Continuous Selection for Binders (PANCS-Binders) technology for rapid de novo binder discovery. To directly assess the speed and utility of the approach, we pursued three cancer-related targets: NSD3, NMNAT2, and CSF1R. Within 26 days, the PANCS-Binders workflow yielded sequence- and function-verified binders for all three targets with nano-to-micromolar affinities. By incorporating an NSD3 binder into an engineered E3 ligase, RNF8, we developed an NSD3 degrader that potently depleted endogenous NSD3 and inhibited colorectal cancer cell proliferation. We then applied this degrader to reveal previously unknown NSD3 dependencies in ovarian cancer cell lines, uncovering new therapeutic vulnerabilities. Together, our work establishes a robust workflow for accelerated binder discovery and demonstrates how binders can expedite chemical biology discovery and biotechnology development.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

This work is now out at @pnas.org In drug discovery it’s often said selectivity is key - and here is a solution! Our PANCS platforms continue to expand! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

1/ Check out our newest paper where we ask: How fast can we experimentally discover binders from scratch? And we mean scratch: a blinded study. TLDR: 26 days. And the binders work…and led to new cancer biology. We’re coming for you AI…. chemrxiv.org/engage/chemr...

Check out our newest work! This is a story on how to get selectivity in binders - both isoform and site selectivity. Read the paper or enjoy this brief Skytorial of what we did! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/n

Proteins that bind to a target protein of interest, termed "binders," are essential components of biological research reagents and therapeutics. Target proteins present multiple binding surfaces with ...