The Pharmacist / Fall-Winter 2023 / Volume 1 / Issue 1

COLLEGE NEWS
José Villegas Receives
NIH New Innovator Award
BY ROB MITCHUM
Two UIC researchers, José Villegas and Ruixuan Gao,
have received New Innovator Awards from the National
Institutes of Health to fund high-risk, high-reward
research at the cutting edge of science. Gao and
Villegas are the first UIC faculty members to receive
New Innovator Awards from the NIH. The awards
select and fund exceptional early career investigators
to pursue unconventional, innovative work with the
potential for high impact across science and medicine.
Villegas, an assistant professor in the college’s
Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, received
a New Innovator Award from the National Institute
of Allergy and Infectious Disease. His work uses
computational methods to design new strategies for
treating viruses and cancer.
#
2
The UIC College of
Pharmacy made the
list of Knowinsiders’
Most Prestigious
Pharmaceutical
Sciences Programs
at #2.
DESIGNING TRAPS FOR VIRUSES
When designing drugs, researchers typically seek
a compound that can bind to a target and block its
activity—for example, inactivating a viral enzyme. But
these selective drug-target binding opportunities
are difficult to design with current tools and tough to
execute at dosages that make sense therapeutically.
Villegas combines biomaterial design and medicinal
chemistry to take a different approach: trapping molecular
targets as they are formed. He uses computational models
and artificial intelligence to create strategies for disrupting
viruses, rendering them noninfectious.
“What we want to do is not necessarily block the
interactions between viral proteins but rather just kind
of push them in the wrong direction,” Villegas said. “We
use small proteins or peptides to perturb their assembly
process and drive viruses to be misshapen or simply
nonfunctional.”
This different approach has several advantages,
Villegas said. Because these compounds don’t need
to bind to a specific functional site on the target, it’s
less computationally intensive to run drug design
simulations. Villegas hypothesizes that this strategy
should also make it harder for drug resistance to evolve.
“We normally design these drugs to be super tightly
binding, and these interactions are so precise that any
small change the virus makes can kick out that drug,”
Villegas said. “But if we’re not relying on those strong
interactions, then the hope is that it won’t be so easy to
kick out, because there won’t be just one little mutation
that can just destroy the approach.”
The NIAID New Innovator Award will support Villegas as
he attempts to apply this approach to HIV, for example,
by disrupting the formation of the protective capsid
shell of the virus. If successful, the project will provide
proof-of-concept that this method could be used in
other disease contexts, such as inactivating genetic
factors that boost the proliferation of cancer cells.
It’s Villegas’s first major award since he became full-time
UIC faculty last year via the Bridge to Faculty Program. Led
by the UIC Office of Diversity, Equity, and Engagement,
the program recruits academics from underrepresented
backgrounds to serve as postdoctoral scholars for two
years before transitioning to a junior faculty position.
For Villegas, who grew up moving between the United
States and Mexico, the program and the broader UIC
mission made the university the right home for his
research, teaching, and outreach.
“It seemed like the values that the university embodies
are very much in line with my own values and how I see
the purpose of education,” Villegas said. “I knew I would
prefer to be at a public university in a place where we’re
also contributing to upward mobility and reaching out to
underserved communities.”
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