Dr Rhys Grinter - Biography

Making proteins with AI

Dr Rhys Grinter is transforming drug development by harnessing Nobel Prize-winning AI technology to design new proteins. His innovative approach streamlines the production of these proteins in the lab, delivering potential drugs many times faster than traditional methods.

Rhys will use his $1.25 million CSL Centenary Fellowship to target a group of proteins that regulate a host of fundamental cellular processes and play a role in many diseases, including cancer, metabolic dysregulation, heart disease, and infertility.

He hopes to develop a range of potential drugs to treat these diseases. His longer-term vision is to build and share a protein development capability that will fast-track drug discovery and build on Australia’s leadership in protein chemistry.

Proteins aren’t just the ‘building blocks’ of life. They also regulate and manage all the metabolic processes in our cells. Once a protein becomes useful, it often gets duplicated, and evolution modifies it for other processes.

Rhys focuses on a group of proteins known as Leucine-Rich Repeat-Containing G-Protein coupled receptors (LGR-GPCRs). He will use his AI platform to make small proteins that modulate the function of a range of these signalling proteins.

He will home in on specific issues including:

• A protein that binds with the hormone relaxin, and is relevant to acute heart failure and prostate cancer
• A protein that binds with thyroid-stimulating hormone and could help with conditions such as Graves’ disease and thyroid-associated eye diseases
• A group of proteins associated with tumour proliferation, invasion and metastasis
• A protein important to reproductive function

Rhys began his career at Flinders University followed by a PhD at the University of Glasgow and then a return to Australia and Monash University. He now leads a team at the Bio21 Institute, The University of Melbourne.

In 2023 he worked with a team to discover how microbes live on air by oxidising hydrogen and carbon monoxide. The research, published in Nature, revealed the complex structures of the proteins involved.

In 2025 he demonstrated the effectiveness of his AI protein platform with a paper in Nature Communications on making ready-to-use proteins that can kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Read more about Dr Rhys Grinter at https://www.grinterlab.org/