Vahe Bandarian & Karsten Eastman

Vahe Bandarian, Distinuished Chemistry Professor, and former graduate student Karsten Eastman worked together pursuing patenting on a new invention that resulted from their research. An article by the University of Utah Technology Licensing Office stated:

"Bandarian, a chemistry professor, researches enzymes whose function is unknown but give the cell some sort of advantage. 'We basically pick a class of enzymes or a class of molecules and then look at every level from how they're made, what the actual enzyme does, all the way down to the atomic level,' Bandarian said. 'We are a lot more focused on discovering new and cool chemistry and enzymes.'

When then-graduate student Karsten Eastman joined Bandarian’s lab, Eastman hopped on one of the available projects, and through some serendipity Eastman and Bandarian realized the enzyme they were studying had the potential to change peptide-based therapeutics.

Typically, enzymes have one job to perform, but this particular enzyme was doing a lot more than normal. 'We realized that we might be able to apply this to start making better versions of therapeutics already on the market,' Eastman said. 'Once we had this aha moment of, ‘Hey, look, we can actually use this molecular machine to do work on a lot of different things,’ that set everything in motion.”

Read the rest of the article and their discoveries here!