Dr. Louis-Philippe Picard (left), a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Scott Prosser’s lab, and Dr. Jiaxi Peng (right), a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Aaron Wheeler’s lab, are recipients of the PRiME Industry-Partnered Fellowship Program.
The PRiME research community is working on cutting edge technologies to advance drug discovery and therapeutic development. Partnerships and internships for trainees are a key step to supporting this aim, as well as to cultivating transferable skills in the next generation of scientists. Through the PRiME Industry-Partnered Fellowship Program, two exceptional trainees have been recipients of funding to further their research projects with industry collaborators.
Dr. Louis-Philippe Picard, a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Scott Prosser’s lab in the Chemistry department at UTM, is working on a protocol for the rapid discovery of nanobodies as next generation therapeutics for G Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs). In the Fall 2020 competition of the Mitacs Elevate Program , Dr. Picard was awarded a two year fellowship for this project. The work is an exciting hybrid of chemistry, molecular and cell biology, and animal work and the bi-weekly team meetings have been eye opening for both the academic and industry scientists involved.
In the span of a few months, the collaboration has completed an initial panning of first-generation molecules and is now refining the approach to find enhancers and inhibitors of signalling. Using the unique models developed at KisoJi Biotechnology, the team is hoping to demonstrate the application of bivalent nanobodies for a number of applications in GPCR pharmacology that were formerly the domain of small molecules only.
In the recent Spring 2021 Elevate competition, another PRiME trainee, Dr. Jiaxi Peng, was also awarded an Elevate fellowship. Dr. Peng is a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Aaron Wheeler’s lab, previously funded through PRiME’s Fellowship Program in a collaboration with Profs. Hui Peng and Cindi Morshead to analyze neural stem cell aging through single-cell proteomics using the Wheeler lab’s DISCO (Digital microfluidic Isolation of Single Cells for -Omics) platform. In his current Elevate project with SCIEX , Dr. Peng aims to develop a next generation of DISCO for analyzing proteome dynamics and networks at the single cell level in stem cell reprogramming. These capabilities are crucial in understanding stem cell biology especially in the early stages of cell induction where protein expression and abundance are rapidly changing.
Prof. Wheeler commented, “I am thrilled that Dr. Peng is being recognized in this way – he is working on cutting-edge technology, and I look forward to seeing what we will do with our new collaborators at SCIEX. I am also grateful for how PRiME supported Dr. Peng and facilitated our connection to SCIEX through the MITACS Elevate Program”.
The Industry-Partnered Fellowship Program leverages funding from Mitacs Programs to help provide graduate students and postdoctoral fellows the opportunity to work with industry partners of PRiME. In addition to funding, the Elevate Program provides research management training for awardees. Further information about Mitacs suite of programs can be found here.