Thomas Steitz, Ph.D., a founder of New Haven's Rib-X Pharmaceuticals as well as Sterling professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry and professor of chemistry at Yale University, on January 13 presented his Nobel Lecture for a local audience.

A capacity crowd, including Yale University President Richard Levin,  filled Harkness Auditorium at the Sterling Hall of Medicine to hear the Nobel laureate.

The lecture, From the Structure and Function of the Ribosome to New Antibiotics, was first delivered at Stockholm University last December, two days before Professor Steitz received the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Professor Steitz's work describes the structure and function of the ribosome, the protein making factory key to the function of all life.
Click here to view a video of the lecture in Stockholm.

Professor Steitz's close collaboration with Yale faculty colleague Peter Moore and interactions with William Jorgensen led to the establishment of Rib-X Pharmaceuticals, Inc., which is using this knowledge of the structures of the large ribosomal subunit and its antibiotic complexes to create new classes of antibiotics.

"It's great to see Tom Steitz get the Nobel," said Dr. Erin Duffy, who is Vice President, Structure-Based Drug Design, at Rib-X. "He's a brilliant scientist and a really nice guy, always interacting and interested when he visits the Rib-X lab." 

Work at Rib-X has yielded several distinctive new antibiotics that can be used for the treatment of multi-antibiotic resistant infections. These include three programs – radezolid, Rχ-04 and Rχ-02 – that are derived from Rib-X’s proprietary discovery engine. Radezolid is a late stage Phase 2 novel oxazolidinone designed to expand the bacterial spectrum and improve the utility of this class of antibiotics relative to the only other oxazolidinone marketed in the world, Zyvox® (linezolid).

Rχ-04 employs a de novo approach to develop novel antibiotics that are active against multi-drug resistant Gram-negative bacteria. Rχ-02 is focused on engineering novel macrolides that have demonstrated activity against known bacterial resistance mechanisms and have also demonstrated activity against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

Rib-X recently announced that it had entered into a further license agreement with Yale in the area of ribosome and antibiotic structure and function (more). It also recently announced a collaborative research agreement with Massachusetts General Hospital (more).
Dr. Steitz, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, shared the $1.4 million award with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, United Kingdom and Ada E. Yonath, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot. All three used a technology called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.

Dr. Steitz was selected by the Nobel Prize Committee for his research on using X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome. Dr. Steitz focused on a subunit of the ribosome, which has proved to be a major target for antibiotics. By generating 3D models that show how different antibiotics bind to the ribosome, scientists can now develop new antibiotics.

Dr. Steitz was born in 1940 in Milwaukee and received a degree in molecular biology and biochemistry in 1966 from Harvard University.