Abhishek Chatterjee PhD

Abhishek Chatterjee is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at Boston College. He obtained his Ph.D. at Cornell University and was the recipient of the Smith Family Award for Excellence in Biomedical Research (2013), the Jared Purton Memorial Award (TSRI) (2012), and the Tunis Wentink Prize (Cornell) (2008).

The Chatterjee group takes an interdisciplinary approach to engineering biology with the ultimate goal of developing new technologies to probe complex biological questions and create novel biotherapeutics that target challenging human diseases. A particular focus of the group is the development of technology for site-directed incorporation of noncanonical amino acids (NCAA) with enabling chemistries into proteins expressed in living cells. We are using this technology for 1) The development of new site-specific bioconjugation approaches, especially ones that are compatible with existing bioconjugation chemistries to enable site-specific protein labeling with multiple distinct entities; 2) The development of next-generation biotherapeutics, such as antibody conjugates, as well as precisely modified adeno-associated virus vectors for human gene therapy; 3) Elucidating the roles of various post-translational modifications of mammalian proteins; 4) Versatile analysis of newly synthesized proteins in living cells. In order to facilitate these applications, we have: 1) Developed new aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase/tRNA platforms that enable site-specific incorporation of previously inaccessible ncAAs, 2) Combined these platforms to enable site-specific incorporation of multiple distinct ncAAs into proteins, 3) Developed optimized delivery strategies for introducing the NCAA incorporation machinery in a broad range of mammalian cells, and 4) Developed a novel mammalian cell-based directed evolution platform to improve the performance of the NCAA incorporation machinery.