Introduction
Life science
Life science is an interdisciplinary branch of science that deals with life processes and living organisms. Our lab focuses on several issues of computational biophysics, medicine and bioinformatics. Physical principles and numerical techniques are used to understand molecular mechanisms underlying protein aggregation which is associated with many neurodegenerative diseases. Computer-aided drug design is employed to identify potential drugs from large data bases for many diseases, in particular, influenza, Alzheimer’s disease and breast cancer. Binding affinity and binding mechanisms of ligands to drug targets are uncovered by docking and molecular simulations. Concerning bioinformatics we study conserve regions of entire protein families that are important in drug and vaccine design, evolutionary conserved and functionally important residues, such as those in active centers of enzymes, as well as residues important for preservation of the protein overall stability. One of our long-term goals is to make contribution to development of personalized medicine.
Due to limitation of all-atom models in computational speed we develop coarse-grained models to study self-assembly of biomolecules, protein folding under quenched force and the influence of codon rate on co-translational folding in cell.
We have close collaboration on drug discovery and system biology with other experimental and computational groups in Vietnam and around the world.
Mission and vision
Our vision is to build Life Science Lab as a center of excellence in computational biophysics and medicine in Vietnam and internationally.
Our mission is to discover potential drugs for various diseases including Alzheimer’s, cancer and other diseases, to understand molecular and genetic factors controlling these diseases, and to contribute computational tools for studying biomolecules.
Current Projects
- Computer drug design for Alzheimer’s disease, type-II diabetes, breast cancer, HIV and influenza virus
- Protein cotranslational folding, unfolding, and misfolding
- Impact of metal ions and membrane on protein self-assembly
- Evolution of influenza A virus
- Comparative study of human cancer genomics
- Method development: Coarse-grained models for studying protein aggregation and folding at ribosome exit and novel method for finding an optimal path to pull ligand from binding site of receptor.
Research