Brief CV:
Serrano’s did a Ph.D. at CBM, Madrid, a postdoc in the UK, then became a Junior PI and later Head of the Structural & Computational Biology programme at EMBL, and finally CRG Director. He has published 400 peer-reviewed publications. Serrano’s initiated EU-LIFE and SOMMa associations enhancing research excellence across Europe and Spain. He has founded six startups and developed FoldX, a protein design software, that has achieved global usage and substantial licensing revenue. Serrano’s contributions have been recognized with the Marie Curie Excellence, the City of Barcelona, the Francisco Cobos, the Jaume I, Spanish national Innovation and Catalan National research awards. He has received four ERC Advanced and four ERC Proof of Concept grants.
Specific delivery of enhanced active biomolecules to treat lung diseases
Abstract:
Potent biologics often fail in clinical use because they cannot be delivered or activated precisely at diseased tissue, leading to systemic toxicity. Immunotherapy illustrates this challenge: while it is now an established cancer treatment, many promising molecules remain limited by severe side effects. This challenge has created strong interest in strategies that enables specific tumour killing and/or targeted delivery and activation of immune cells within tumours.
Our proposal addresses this challenge by developing a programmable therapeutic platform that minimizes systemic toxicity by activating biologics exclusively at the disease site. The platform combines FoldXpro, a new protein design pipeline that integrates first principles with AI to enable quantitative and specific protein masking, with Mycochassis, a cell-wall–deficient lung bacterial vector.
