Photo credit: Christopher Michel — File:Brian Kobilka 361726 by Christopher Michel 6-20-24.jpg (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 4.0
Brian K. Kobilka
born 1955 · United States · Contemporary
Nobel Chemistry 2012
American physician-scientist who crystallised GPCRs, the receptor family targeted by a third of all medicines.
Nobel Prize work
Shared the prize with Robert Lefkowitz for studies of G-protein-coupled receptors. Kobilka cloned the β₂-adrenergic receptor gene and, in 2011, captured the first crystal structure of an active receptor bound to its G protein — explaining how cells sense hormones and drugs across the membrane.
Fields
Related topics
Structure-based drug design
Structure-based design uses a macromolecular structure to generate and test hypotheses about ligand recognition.
Cryo-EM, protein crystallography
Structural biologists infer molecular architecture from scattered electrons or X-ray diffraction, with distinct sample preparation and data-processing limits.