Peter Tompa

Peter Tompa, co-founder of New Equilibrium, is among the pioneer researchers of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) who played an active role in the rise of the IDP field. Since first encountering an IDP in the 90’s and realizing that some proteins are intended to not have folded structures, Peter has developed many concepts for understanding the disorder-function relationships of these paradigm-breaking proteins, such as moonlighting, fuzziness, supertertiary structure, multisteric regulation, and conformational signaling. Peter received his PhD in biochemistry and enzymology from ELTE University, Budapest. He began his current academic role as Professor of Biochemistry at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and group leader at the Flanders Institute of Biotechnology-Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VIB-VUB) Center for Structural Biology in 2011, where he also served as director from 2011-2016. Excited about the potential for targeting IDPs with drugs, Peter conducted a multi-year collaborative project with a leading pharma company to target an IDP oncogene. He has published more than 200 papers on IDPs, as well as the first monograph of the IDP field, Structure and Function of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins (Taylor and Francis, Inc.). In 2019, Peter joined Virginia in launching New Equilibrium, driven to translate the past two decades of IDP research into new drugs that target these yet undrugged proteins.https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-tompa-181a461b1/