Joseph Muretta, PhD

Our team investigates the molecular underpinnings of life and uses what we learn to develop engineered proteins for treating disease. Much of our work is focused on developing new antibodies and antibody-fusion proteins for cancer and protein sequences used in gene-therapy that maximize efficacy and immune tolerance.

Projects include investigating the function of dystrophin in muscular dystrophy, engineering protein allosteric modulators of cell surface receptors including those involved in immune cell differentiation, engineering therapeutic antibodies and antibody-cytokine fusion proteins for treating solid tumors like breast and pancreatic cancer, creating antibody-drug conjugates and bispecific immune cell engagers for pediatric cancers, creating novel chimeric antigen receptor platforms to improve efficacy of T cell therapies, developing optimized therapeutic protein sequences for rare-disease gene-therapy, and executing small molecule screens to identify allosteric inhibitors and activators of protein function.

Our work uses whatever approaches best solve the problem at hand including:

• Phage- and yeast-display protein engineering workflows
• Recombinant protein sequence libraries
• High-throughput screening
• Recombinant protein expression in bacteria, yeast, insect, and mammalian cell culture systems
• Biophysical characterization of protein-protein interactions
• Steady-state and transient biochemical kinetics
• Protein thermal stability
• Optical biophysical spectroscopy for structural dynamics
• Protein structure determined by X-ray crystallography, Cryo-EM, and NRM