Dr. Niv Papo is the Krill Prize laureate in Life Sciences for 2014. Papo is a member of the Avram and Stella Goldstein-Goren Department of Biotechnology Engineering and the National Institute for Biotechnology in the Negev (NIBN).
Krill Prizes for Excellence in Scientific Research are awarded in Honor and in Memory of Benjamin and Gitla Krill Mansbach Shlanger Z'L. Six Krill Prizes are awarded annually, in Exact Sciences, Life Sciences, Medicine, Agriculture and Engineering, to excelling faculty members at the Universities in Israel, who hold the untenured positions of Lecturer, or Senior Lecturer.
Recipients are selected by the Wolf Foundation Scholarship Committee, from among outstanding candidates, submitted by all Israeli Universities. The selection is made on the basis of the candidate´s excellence and the importance of his or her field of research.
Papo’s research focuses on using both rational and combinatorial synthetic methods to develop a new generation of alternative (non-immunoglobulin) protein scaffolds for a variety of applications in basic biological research (study protein-protein interactions) and medicine (cancer imaging and therapy). A ‘scaffold’ is a protein framework that can carry altered amino acids or insertions providing protein variants with entirely novel functions such as new binding specificities. Therapeutically useful targets for the affinity protein scaffolds that are being developed in Dr. Papo's lab include cancer-related soluble protein factors or extracellular regions of cancer cell (or tumor vasculature) membrane receptors.
Cancer treatment is currently shifting towards more personalized approaches which require knowledge about differences in expression patterns of cancer markers. The Papo lab is using the evolved affinity proteins as selective in vivo imaging and therapeutic agents to detect, identify and target these markers.
Papo is the recent recipient of a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant as well as grants and prizes from six other foundations in the last year and a half.
The Krill Prizes for Excellence in Scientific Research were first awarded in March 2005.
