Harvard professor wins Agilent grant

Professor Gerhard Wagner at Harvard Medical School has received a US$373,000 Agilent Thought Leader Award in support of his work using high magnetic field nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to analyse large proteins.

The Agilent award, granted over three years, will help the lab develop fast and efficient assignment methods for large proteins by NMR and make these methods accessible to the biology community.

‘NMR spectroscopy has still a tremendous potential to grow and provide unique information about important biological systems, such as large multidomain proteins, protein complexes and membrane proteins,’ said Wagner.

‘I expect that innovations in NMR will come from new experimental schemes, supported by new expression and labelling schemes.’

Wagner’s award from the Agilent Foundation will be used to push forward such developments and make them widely available to the scientific community. This will provide tools for generating new insights into structures of large macromolecular complexes, understanding of biological mechanisms and design of new drugs.

Regina Schuck, Agilent’s vice president and general manager, Research Products Division, said: ‘Most government agencies fund research into the causes of diseases. In this case, we’re funding development of better tools for doing the research.’

The methods developed under this project will be shared with the biology community through scientific publication and on the Wagner team’s website.

Agilent’s Thought Leader programme promotes fundamental advances in the life sciences by contributing financial support and sometimes scientific instrumentation and/or expertise to research.