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# Youssef Atef AbdelAlim carries protein science lessons to medical school
* June 20, 2024
For IPI research associate Youssef Atef AbdelAlim, science is synonymous with patient care. He’s run antibody discovery sorts, engineered protein libraries and performed fluorescence microscopy. He’s rounded the clinics, organized vaccination appointments and assisted with cardiac care. At every stage, he’s seen how science and medicine intertwine.
After a year and a half at IPI, he’s now headed to medical school to focus now on patient wellbeing as he fulfills his dream of becoming a physician.
“The connection between science and people is what drew me in,” he says. “Seeing patients recover, it’s just really fulfilling.”
### “The science of us”
As a youngster in Cairo, Egypt, then Worcester, Massachusetts, Atef AbdelAlim loved engineering and mathematics. His parents, passionate about medicine and science, encouraged him to channel these interests into biology. Atef AbdelAlim remained in Massachusetts to pursue bioengineering and biochemistry at Northeastern University. He was drawn by their cooperative education program that integrates experiential learning as part of the four-year degree.
During one six-month internship, Atef AbdelAlim joined Ultivue’s research and development team, working on fluorescence microscopy imagery of immune cells in cancer tissue. He gained experience with antibodies, DNA and cancerous tonsil tissue — which encouraged him to “explore medicine more,” he says.
Youssef Atef AbdelAlim, second from the left, and the IPI team listen to a talk at a science retreat in 2022. IPI photo by Caitlin Faulds.
He began devoting time to extracurricular research and volunteered at a Tufts Medical School remote call center, where, during the depths of the pandemic, he helped organize more than 10,000 COVID-19 vaccination appointments for Boston residents. He also shadowed brain surgeons and anesthesiologists back in Cairo, as part of his family’s annual trips back to Egypt.
He learned a critical reality of modern-day medicine: “Doctors don’t spend a ton of time with patients,” he says, “but the impact they have on these people is huge.”
He spent his next co-op in the cardiac surgery unit at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) researching the efficacy of mitral valve regurgitation repair surgery, an operation that repairs a connection between the two left-side chambers of the heart. At BWH, he worked directly with patients for the first time. While sitting in on one heart surgery, he had the opportunity to touch a beating heart.
“It’s the realest it gets,” he says. “This is the science of us.”
### Contributing to protein science
In 2022, after graduation, Atef AbdelAlim wanted another perspective on medicine. He applied for a job at IPI, drawn by the Institute’s open science outlook and its mission to advance protein science in the form of antibody discovery, which he saw as playing a major — if often obscured — role in overall health goals.
“IPI is not making drugs, per se, but we’re helping to make those things eventually,” he says. “I thought that would be a cool way to contribute to human health.”
As part of the antibody discovery team, Atef AbdelAlim helped grow IPI’s yeast display library, run fluorescence-activated cell sorting and carefully winnow billions of antibodies down to just a few prime, well-binding antibody candidates. Along with director of antibody discovery and library design André Teixeira, scientist Deepash Kothiwal and senior research associate Nick Hollmer, he also reengineered the IPI yeast library to better mimic the naïve B cell repertoire of the human immune system — an exploratory project that took the better part of a year.
“The most exciting moment was when we finished the last piece of [the library], the last germline combination,” he says.
Youssef Atef AbdelAlim works in the lab at IPI. IPI photo by Caitlin Faulds.
While spending his days in the lab, Atef AbdelAlim was studying for the MCAT, sending applications to more than 30 medical programs and attending zoom interviews across the U.S. and Canada.
“The application to medical schools is definitely a marathon,” he says. “Everyone has been super supportive here.”
### An end to the marathon
In fall of 2024, Atef AbdelAlim will attend the Hackensack Meridian Medical School in New Jersey. He hopes to pursue cardiac surgery, but for the time being, he’s keeping the door open to other specialties.
Although research and antibody discovery will no longer be his day-to-day focus, he’ll bring an in-depth understanding of antibodies and the many steps necessary to build effective therapeutics. Additionally, he’s taken IPI’s experimental, scientific mindset to heart.
“Curiosity is an important skill they teach here [at IPI]. It’s important not to be shy to learn,” he says. “You’re only going to learn by making mistakes.”
**Source:** Youssef Atef AbdelAlim, 
**Writer:** Caitlin Faulds, 
**About IPI**
The Institute for Protein Innovation is pioneering a new approach to scientific discovery and collaboration. As a nonprofit research institute, we provide the biomedical research community with synthetic antibodies and deep protein expertise, empowering scientists to explore fundamental biological processes and pinpoint new targets for therapeutic development. Our mission is to advance protein science to accelerate research and improve human health. For more information, visit proteininnovation.org or follow us on social media, @ipiproteins.
!ABOUTThe Institute for Protein Innovation is pioneering a new approach to scientific discovery and collaboration. As a nonprofit research institute, we provide the biomedical research community with synthetic antibodies and deep protein expertise, empowering scientists to explore fundamental biological processes and pinpoint new targets for therapeutic development. Our mission is to advance protein science to accelerate research and improve human health.
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# Innovation comes naturally to IPI’s director of automation Curtis Walton
* June 5, 2024
When Curtis Walton was young, he’d disassemble household items, diligently learning about their inner mechanisms as he reassembled them.
Growing up in Sarnia, Ontario, he pulled off this exercise on the family computer, but failed on a prized clock — leaving parts and pieces askew, much to his father’s dismay. In high school, he channeled this astute curiosity into the robotics team, where he engineered bots that could complete small tasks, like throwing basketballs or stacking pyramids.
His team, #1084, never made it to the finals of the , but his early explorations taught him the basics of mechanization and design — skills he now adeptly applies as the director of automation at the Institute for Protein Innovation (IPI).
“At IPI, we’re looking across the board,” Walton says, “coming up with a plan to improve productivity and discover more antibodies for the research community.”
The effort is key to the Institute’s maturation from a start-up-like nonprofit to a go-to organization making protein tools and knowledge easily available and accessible to the biomedical research community.
### The mechanics of life
Walton’s part in that mission has roots in his early robotics competitions. But at the , he faced a choice: pursue programming and software engineering or become a scientist. He settled on the life sciences, excited to explore the questions of life, rather than the mechanics of clocks, computers and automatons.
Curtis Walton and the IPI team. IPI photo by Sabrina Liu.
Biology, he felt, could reveal molecular interactions that impact health; but chemistry could strip problems back to their fundamental chemical framework. Putting the two together and studying biochemistry, Walton could finally understand how molecules were built, why they interacted in such seemingly complex ways and how they fulfilled particular functions.
More specifically, Walton became enthralled with , a group of enzymes important in amino acid metabolism. These biocatalysts can be used to track disease and replace toxic heavy metal catalysts in the synthesis of enantiopure compounds, which are pure chemical compounds that exist in just one unique shape or chirality. For his doctoral research, he focused on engineering aminotransferases to produce a variety of , “high-value building blocks” that are used in the synthesis of pharmaceuticals.
### Always automating
From there, he took his first post-graduate position in 2018 as a scientist at a Canadian cannabinoid research startup, . Until the mid-2010s, Canadian authorities treated marijuana as a controlled substance, making research into the pharmaceutical compounds of cannabis difficult. But with legalization in 2018, that roadblock was lifted. Hyasynth was at the forefront of the race to develop microbial-derived cannabinoids that could be used for research or market products, and they needed a protein scientist with a startup mentality — someone like Walton.
It was a “very easy transition,” according to Walton, who spent two years engineering lead candidates and identifying potential enzymes for cannabinoid production in bacteria and yeast.
By August 2020, Walton was ready for a change. He moved to the U.S. and joined a growing computational team at , a commercial biotech using enzyme and microorganism platforms to deliver synthetic biology solutions to the food and beverage, renewable materials and pharma markets alike.
As a senior scientist at Conagen, Walton was given carte blanche to lay the foundations of an automation infrastructure, gearing up the lab for more effective production. Given his background and knack for building labs — a skill he learned on the fly during grad school — he was promoted to director of computational and automated biology, where he gained daily experience running a multidisciplinary team spanning bioinformatics, protein engineering, analytical chemistry and strain engineering.
“Productivity or innovation is questioning established protocols, thinking outside of the box and coming up with new and better ways of performing engineering,” Walton says.
### Fostering discovery
Curtis Walton. IPI photo by Sabrina Liu.
Walton was happy leading this charge in industry, but then he stumbled onto IPI, where the principles and protocols of an industrial pipeline were being deployed for scientific impact rather than profit. As a nonprofit, IPI was producing antibodies to families of proteins studding the cell surface, known as the cell surfaceome, and expanding access to those imperative protein tools — and the Institute was ready to scale.
“If we want to tackle the surfaceome or every single human protein, the only way we’re going to achieve that is with automation,” says Walton, who joined IPI last year.
In the short term, Walton is focused on gathering the right hardware and constructing the best team. Once these foundations are in place, he aims to upgrade IPI’s systems, improve workflow and increase capacity for automation within just a few years. His end goal is to use automation to develop a robust and consistent pipeline, freeing scientists of repetitive tasks so they can allot more time to research and discovery.
“We’re in a very unique position to help advance the biomedical field,” he says, “and put antibodies out into the world that wouldn’t otherwise be made available.”
**Source:** Curtis Walton, 