Thursday, September 30, 2004 | Professor of Biochemistry Homme Hellinga has been selected as one of the first recipients of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Pioneer Award. The award – which provides an unrestricted grant of $500,000 per year for five years – was established “to encourage exceptional researchers and thinkers from multiple disciplines to conduct high-risk, high-impact research related to the improvement of human health,” according to the institute.

Hellinga was among nine researchers named to receive the awards, which were announced on September 29, 2004, by NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D.

“We are extremely pleased by the overwhelming number and caliber of nominations we received,” Zerhouni said. “By bringing the awardees’ unique perspectives and creativity to bear on key medical research questions, these scientific Pioneers may one day develop seminal theories or technologies that will propel science forward to improve human health.”

The winners were chosen based on qualities such as their scientific innovation and creativity, intellectual energy and leadership potential, said the NIH.

Hellinga’s research has concentrated on theoretical and experimental approaches to designing proteins and drugs. His computational methods have enabled him and his colleagues to engineer proteins to alter their functions.

For example, in one recent paper, he and his colleagues described using computational design to engineer a naturally occurring bacterial protein to detect a nerve gas. And in another paper, the researchers described the first use of computational design methods to transform a protein devoid of catalytic activity into a biologically active enzyme.

Such efforts aim at developing a new technology of “synthetic biology,” in which scientists construct tailor-made organisms for a variety of tasks, including as “biological sentinels.” Such sentinels could find wide use in medical and environmental applications. Engineered proteins could provide the basis of detectors for explosives, toxic agents, pollutants or molecular markers of disease.