Designing Protein Drugs for Cancer & Autoimmunity: Chris Garcia on The Long Run

Today’s guest on The Long Run is K. Christopher Garcia.

Chris Garcia, professor, Stanford University; investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Chris is a professor of molecular and cellular physiology and structural biology at Stanford University and an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. To be a bit more specific, you can call him a structural immunologist – the kind of scientist who uses the vivid tools of structural biology to better understand fundamental workings of genes, proteins, and cells of the immune system.

His work is rooted in basic science – basic questions of how life works. But it has paved the way for significant applications, such as new drugs for cancer, autoimmunity, and platforms for further discovery.

Garcia is a scientific co-founder of multiple companies, including Synthekine (the developer of custom-designed cytokine drugs), ALX Oncology (a company working on the ‘don’t eat me’ signals sent out by cancer cells, and 3T Biosciences, which works on TCR antigen discovery.

Garcia’s accolades are starting to add up as well. He recently won the Max Cooper Prize in Immunology, named for one of the field’s pioneers. The nomination paper from professor Toni Ribas of UCLA describes a jaw-dropping list of contributions Garcia has made to the field. The nomination paper cites Garcia’s:

“Groundbreaking structural discoveries which revealed how immune receptors signal in response to ligand engagement, which have revolutionized our understanding of the immune system and are leading to novel engineered therapeutics currently being tested in patients with cancer.

It goes on:

Dr. Garcia elucidated how cell surface receptors signal in response to ligand binding at the cell surface and used protein engineering to translate this structural and mechanistic information into therapeutics. Dr. Garcia resolved groundbreaking three-dimensional structures of ligand-receptor complexes which play critical roles in human biology and disease, including the structural basis for how most immune cytokines engage their receptors (IL-1, IL-2, IL-4, IL-6, IL-10, IL-12, IL-13, IL-15, IL-17, IL-21, IL-22, IL-23, IL-27, and Type I, II and III IFNs).”

Whew.

Aaron Ring, a researcher at Fred Hutch Cancer Center, a previous guest on The Long Run, and one of the most brilliant young scientists I know, tells me that Garcia is “the best protein engineer alive.”

This episode traces Garcia’s life story, including his improbable route to the pinnacle of science, and why he thinks staying super-fit through long-distance running helps him in his day-to-day work.

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Please enjoy this episode with Chris Garcia, an exceptionally talented and driven scientist.