Nicolas Thomä receives the Otto Naegeli Prize 2022

Nicolas Thomä, a research group leader at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI) in Basel, receives the Otto Naegeli Prize for Medical Research, one of the most prestigious scientific awards in Switzerland. Thomä is recognized for his groundbreaking work on targeted protein degradation, which contributes to advancing drug design. From the outset of his career, structural biologist Nicolas Thomä has sought to understand the structure and function of protein complexes that ensure genome stability and maintenance, and often play a role in cancer. A specific emphasis of Thomä's research has been on small-molecule therapeutics that target disease-causing proteins for degradation. Thomä's work has shown how some small molecules function as "molecular glues", inducing interactions between a target protein and an enzyme that tags proteins for degradation. Such molecular glues have the potential to target proteins that were previously thought to be undruggable. Research from Thomä's laboratory elucidated how the molecular glue thalidomide and its analogues function at the molecular level.