About Us

The Gobind Khorana Protein Engineering Core was established following a successful application to the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund (BCKDF) to create an Accelerated Drug Discovery Using Clinical Translation (ADDUCT) program. It is generously supported by a grant from the Aqueduct Foundation on behalf of an anonymous donor. The donor held great respect for the late Nobel Prize laureate Professor Har Gobind Khorana (1922–2011) and suggested naming this research platform in his honour.

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Professor Har Gobind Khorana was an Indian-born biochemist who, after doctoral work, trained in protein chemistry and nucleic acids at Cambridge, developing chemical methods to synthesize biologically important phosphate compounds and short nucleotides. At the University of British Columbia, he built a major nucleic acid chemistry program, synthesizing nucleotides and defined DNA/RNA fragments that positioned him to attack the genetic code. Moving to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and later MIT, he used synthetic polynucleotides to help decipher how codons specify amino acids, shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for elucidating the genetic code, and then pioneered stepwise DNA synthesis culminating in the first functional synthetic genes.