From flesh eating bacteria to molecular superglue

As an inventor in Discovery and Development Technologies at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, based in Boston, USA, Bijan Zakeri develops new technological platforms for early stage drug discovery. Educated as a biochemist at Oxford University as a Clarendon Scholar, at McMaster University and as a synthetic biologist at MIT, he invented a biological superglue by engineering a virulence factor from flesh-eating bacteria while at Oxford. The superglue allows proteins to be assembled into new architectures to address needs in the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries.