High-Throughput Chemistry and Engineering with Kadi Saar

Really excited to put out this conversation with Kadi Saar, an outstanding inventor and world-class computational chemist, where we discuss her career spanning childhood interests to graduate research to her work now around high-throughput structural biology and condensates. Kadi is a rising star in life sciences building out new experimental and computational tools to probe biology and advance human health.

Early on in her life, it was pretty obvious that Kadi was very unique. She won Estonia's Got Talent for mental arithmetics. You can watch her talent here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBNrq28ADQY I give Kadi a set of numbers to multiply to see if she still has it. She was a world-ranked tennis player growing up, and ultimately had to make the tough decision to focus on chemistry and engineering upon entering university. She went to Cambridge (Trinity College) studying chemical engineering and biotechnology and conducted her PhD research under Tuomas Knowles also at the University of Cambridge. Afterwards, Kadi did a postdoc as a Schmidt Science Fellow under Knowles and Alpha Lee.

While doing her postdoc, Kadi published really exciting research around merging high-throughput structural biology and computational chemistry to predict protein:ligand affinities and improve virtual screening for drug development. I would really recommend reading her preprint and we also touch upon it later in the conversation: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.15.464568v1.full.pdf In short, the preprint shows that ~100 diverse structures of a ligand in complex with a target protein, using a COVID-19 protease as a proof-of-concept, along with first comparing compounds pairwise before ranking them by bioactivity to remove experimental noise is sufficient to virtually design high affinity binders.

Kadi, in my opinion, is a great example to follow. The conversation goes a lot into her journey towards becoming a scientist and will serve as a resource for years to come. Looking forward to doing another one in a few years and getting an update on Kadi's work. A favorite quote of mine after speaking with Kadi is working on projects where she "likes the people", in particular when having to choose between multiple equally exciting directions.