In today’s capital efficient environment, why would Morphic decide to bring crystallography capabilities in-house?
The majority of Integrins have been refractory to structural characterization, due to heavily glycosylated, heterodimeric metalloproteins composed of many flexible domains and interdomain linkers. The Springer lab is the only lab that has been successful in crystallizing multiple different integrations.
Given this we knew up front that this would be a very challenging piece of our science to externalize but with the expertise of Albert Lin, an inventor of our technology and postdoc from Tim’s lab, we thought it may be possible to outsource under his leadership.
Even with Albert’s assistance, no outside vendor was making progress. Since our focus at Morphic is effective structure based drug design of these challenging targets, waiting around for structures was not an option!
December 2015
“How long does it take to get an Integrin structure?”
Albert said, “3 months to Never.”
It took him just 2 months.
Any further Crystallography work was coming in-house.