Erik Procko

Erik holds an Associate Professorship at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and is a pioneer in the use of Big Data mutagenesis to understand membrane proteins and engineer receptors. He was the first to computationally design a truly de novo protein with function - blockade of a viral oncogene associated with pediatric cancers - and apply deep mutational scanning to human GPCRs and transporters to guide modeling algorithms. He is an inventor on multiple patents and has been published in Cell, Nature, and Science. He is the former co-founder and CEO of Orthogonal Biologics, which merged with Cyrus Biotechnology in 2021. Erik graduated with a B.Sc. in Immunology from the University of Adelaide and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Harvard University.