Yale’s Craig Crews has been awarded the international Heinrich Wieland Prize for his discovery of new methods to target disease-causing proteins, the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation has announced.
Crews developed a way to use the cell’s own protein degradation machinery to destroy targeted proteins by tagging them for removal. The system, called Proteolysis Targeting Chimeras or PROTACs, is being developed by his New Haven biotechnology company, Arvinas.