Kimlab
Welcome to the website of the Kim laboratory. Our research integrates modern computational and experimental approaches to solve important problems in biomedical science. We aim to have major impact on patient care and to aid in the development of new therapies for various disease areas. In these efforts we are aided by the breathtaking pace of discovery in many fields today. Thus, we develop novel machine learning (AI) technologies for computational structural biology as well as other areas, and tightly integrate these methods with modern high-throughput screening technologies in the wet-lab. For instance, we use computational and high-throughput methods to design and validate novel protein and peptide based therapeutics and develop new innovative techniques for systems biology and translational science.
Check out our publication page for more details.
Check out press coverage for news stories about our work, including a 2016 story on the UofT website about our new technology to engineer cancer drugs, and a January 2018 story on C&E News on our technology to generate D-amino acid ("mirror image") analogs of peptide therapeutics. Our novel deep graph neural network technology, as the first validated AI technology to design proteins was covered in September 2020 on UofT Medicine News. Our efforts of developing compounds to fight covid-19 using our D-amino acid technology were featured in the Toronto Star and on CTV in December 2021. Our deep learning method that effectively solves Zinc Finger design to enable novel in vivo therapeutic options for epigenetic editing (and other applications) was featured many places, including G&EN news, Bioworld and AP news in January 2023. Our efforts to find new therapeutic venues for Parkinson's Disease by screening for novel protein-protein interaction inhbitors was also featured many places in April 2023. Our AI system to create fully novel proteins from scratch, the first score-based generative / diffusion model to be developed for protein design, was featured on many news sites in May 2023, including on ScienceDaily, EurekAlert and The Economist.
We are located in the new interdisplinary research centre, the Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, a terrific environment for collaborative research (see Nature). We are affiliated with the following departments and programs:
Department of Molecular Genetics,
Department of Computer Science,
Collaborative Program for Genome Biology and Bioinformatics
all within the
We periodically have positions available for postdoctoral researchers and graduate students, as well as undergraduates.