Johan Rockberg

The goal of my research is to develop new biological drugs and ways to produce them at large scale so that they can become available to patients with diseases without adequate treatment today.

In my area of ​​antibody technology and targeted evolution, I develop and search in libraries of tens of billions of different protein molecules for those that enable a specific interaction with a disease cell to achieve the desired effect. For example, it may be binding to a receptor on a cancer cell to block its function, neutralizing immune defense molecules that have run berserk in the blood of a patient having an autoimmune disease or a means of delivering drugs to the brain through the blood using refined redirected viruses in an Alzheimer's patient.

These types of drugs usually need to be produced from living cells as they are too complex to build otherwise. The challenge is to make mammalian cells capable of producing such proteins or viruses with high efficiency and quality, even though the cells themselves would not normally do so. By studying the cell's DNA, RNA, proteins and metabolites, I try to provide them with the right genetic conditions and environment in the reactor to succeed in producing the drug in the most efficient and scalable way possible.