Design and engineering of adnectins for diagnosis and therapy

There is a need to develop improved polypeptide scaffolds, having increased stability for a variety of therapeutic and diagnostic applications. This proposalseeks to provide highly stable proteins based on the adnectin scaffold. Non-antibody scaffolds suffer a major problem their stability is marginalized afterfunctional selection. Using protein engineering of our highly stabilized adnectin scaffold FN3con, we will circumvent this limitation, generate and screen newmolecules for binding to a panel of clinically-important targets, generating candidate agents for therapeutic and diagnostic use.