Professors Jiayu Liao

Jiayu Liao, assistant professor of bioengineering, is greatly expanding a screening technology that lets researchers observe protein-to-protein crosstalks inside living cells, research which has very broad applications in physiological systems and will lead to new treatments for devastating diseases such as cancer and severe viral infections. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have awarded him $1.1 million for his four-year project. The ability to observe protein-crosstalk processes inside cells began with the discovery by other researchers that the fluorescent protein of a jellyfish could illuminate biological molecules that were once invisible. Refinements led to the ability to mark different proteins so that their interactions can be observed, work that earned a Nobel Prize in 2008. Liao will fully develop and expand these techniques to an industrial level that would be impossible by other methods and is many times faster than tests performed in the standard lab. His goal is to find small-molecule pharmacological tools that would cause protein activity changes in living cells, work that will lead to drug discovery including anticancer and antiviral substances and treatments.