March is International Women's Month! And this year, we are highlighting some of the amazing women chemists and researchers in the Chem-Impex community who inspire us everyday.
Jane Liu is CEO and Co-Founder of BRT Technologies, Inc. Her work has helped create large libraries of macrocycles for early-stage drug discovery. You can learn more about her work in our interview with her below:
Where do you work/study?
I am the CEO and Co-founder of BRT Biotechnologies (BRT Bio), which is a startup that is making large libraries of macrocycles for early-stage drug discovery. I am also a professor of chemistry at Pomona College, a small liberal arts college in Southern California. I am able to juggle both of these important jobs because they literally happen at the same place - the Pomona College Chemistry Building in Claremont, CA! Pomona College has fantastic resources and infrastructure for chemistry research and my company is able to rent out space from the college to support these entrepreneurial efforts.
What is your role there?
Focusing on the CEO aspect of my life - I oversee the general operations of BRT Bio. My job involves all of the things that keep the lights on and move us toward selling our first libraries: finances and fundraising, IP strategy and patent filing, leasing space, marketing and branding, and, of course, finding and retaining the amazing people who help me do all of these things, as well as those who are in the lab, doing the research and development and library builds.
How long have you been there?
We started BRT Bio in Fall 2021 - so it’s been over three years! At times, it feels like it’s only been three days - time moves so quickly. But I was looking over a collection of data that we’ve accumulated over the past few years and I was really struck by how much we have accomplished. It’s easy to get bogged down on all of the immediate problems one’s facing in the day. I try to remind myself to take a step back from time to time and reflect on the problems that we have solved and the forward momentum that we have generated.
What kind of research have you been doing recently?
Part of my fundraising efforts involves writing grant applications. So a lot of my research is not in the lab, but, instead, I am investigating funding opportunities and stated needs and generating ideas of how BRT Bio can address a need. One area that I am very excited about is how BRT Bio’s large and diverse libraries of macrocycles can help address questions about the membrane permeability of macrocycles. The “rules” of membrane permeability for macrocycles are not well known. What we need is a very large data set to use to train a ML program. AlphaFold and other protein folding prediction programs are able to rely on the fantastic Protein Data Bank - which has over 200,000, high-quality, real protein structures - to inform their ML models. There is no parallel for macrocycles. BRT Bio can help with this! We are working toward making 10,000 macrocycles in a 2 week period, which can then be directly tested for function - including membrane permeability. I think, with the right partners, we could really make progress in better understanding the metabolism and pharmacokinetics of macrocycles.
Why is your research important?
For this, let me take the big picture view of BRT Bio - that we want to provide large libraries of macrocycles, which we make using our proprietary technology, BRiTeCycle. Our BRiTeCycle platform allows us to synthesize large, sparsely sampled macrocyclic peptide libraries (ranging from 10,000–1 million at a time) in a matter of weeks (rather than months or years) that can be directly screened for function. BRiTeCycle also allows for rapid iterative synthesis of analogs of promising hits that can be directly screened for activity to quickly identify leads with increased potency. To our knowledge, no other molecular synthesis platform can provide all these capabilities. This is important because our compounds are new chemical matter that could be the starting point for helpful chemical probes or future therapeutics. There are a lot of biological targets out there that haven’t yet been drugged. Let’s all grab some BRT libraries and start screening!
What is the most challenging and most rewarding part of your work?
Research is hard and the development process can be a lot of two steps forward, one step back. The timelines of research seem completely at odds at times with the expected fast-paced speed that start-ups are generally associated with. I think that one of the most challenging parts of my work is to remind myself that building something new doesn’t happen overnight. And also, I need to not let my perfectionist tendencies get in the way of our progress. There is a balance there - to resist the urge to rush, but also to resist spending too much time improving on something that is already working well. On the flip side, working with a team and creating something brand new that others want to use - that’s pretty amazing and a very rewarding part of my job.
What is your hope for the future with this research?
I want people using our libraries! I want people screening our 2.3k libraries and one day our 10k libraries. I want them finding hits and having us synthesize follow up libraries. I want to help early-stage drug discovery programs get to their promising leads faster.
What other chemists or researchers have inspired you?
My dad! He’s a chemist by training, but early in his career, he moved more into cell biology and immunology research. He’s still got an active research lab today. I learned a lot about the importance of hard work and attention to detail in research from watching my dad and his approach to his work. Another inspiration: Greg Copeland, who is also the co-founder and CSO of BRT Bio. He is a voracious reader, an information sponge, and a problem solver. The result is that when he’s thinking about chemical problems, he’s able to jig-saw these disparate pieces into something transformational. It’s very cool to watch. I learn something new from him almost every day.