- Person
- Michael Levitt
- Lived
- b. 1947
- Field
- Computational biology
- From
- American-British-Israeli
The story
Proteins do almost all the work in living cells, and what each one does depends on the precise three-dimensional shape into which its chain of amino acids folds. In the late 1960s, when only two protein structures were known, the idea of calculating a protein’s shape or motion on a computer seemed wildly ambitious.
Michael Levitt, born in 1947 to a Jewish family in Pretoria, South Africa, took on that challenge. As a 20-year-old at the Weizmann Institute in Israel in 1967 and 1968, he and Arieh Warshel wrote a program that could calculate the structure and energy of any molecule, and he applied it to proteins. In 1975 the two published in Nature a simplified model that folded a small protein on a computer into a realistic shape, an early answer to the question of how proteins find their structure. In 1976 they introduced a hybrid method that uses quantum physics for the atoms in a chemical reaction and classical physics for the rest of a protein, making it possible to simulate how enzymes work. Levitt later developed simulations of proteins moving in water, now among the most widely used tools in biology.
His work also reached the clinic. As a consultant to the company Protein Design Labs, he was an author of a 1989 paper describing a humanised antibody against the interleukin-2 receptor, designed with the help of a computer model so that the human immune system would accept a mouse antibody. It became the drug daclizumab, used to help prevent kidney transplant rejection, and the company’s humanisation approach was used in later antibody medicines, including cancer treatments.
In 2013 Levitt shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Martin Karplus and Warshel for multiscale models of complex chemical systems. The Nobel committee said such computer models have become crucial for most advances in chemistry and help scientists optimise drugs, catalysts and solar cells.
Why it matters
The protein simulations Levitt pioneered are used every day to understand disease and design medicines, and his modelling helped create an early humanised antibody drug.
About Michael Levitt
Pretoria-born biophysicist who pioneered computer simulation of proteins, a foundation of modern drug design, and helped design an early humanised antibody medicine. Nobel Prize 2013.
Sources
- Michael Levitt, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013 NobelPrize.org
- A humanized antibody that binds to the interleukin 2 receptor PNAS (PubMed Central)
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.