Darius Vagrys

Darius Vagrys – obtained his BSc in Bioengineering in Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (Lithuania) in 2013, followed by MSc in Biochemistry in Uppsala University (Sweden) in 2016. During his studies, he was involved in numerous scientific projects, such as developing and performing interactions assays for protein – small drug-like molecules using surface plasmon resonance (SPR) and thermal shift assay (TSA), in terms of affinity and kinetics. In addition to this, he was also involved in synthesizing short peptides, using solid-state peptide synthesis. His final Master project involved the expression of the target proteins, fragment screening and evaluation of data, addressing Hepatitis C protein NS5B of various genotypes using an SPR based approach, in collaboration with prof. Helena Danielson’s group at Uppsala University and GE Healthcare Bio-Sciences (Uppsala, Sweden). Following this, he worked at GE Healthcare Bio-Sciences developing current and future Biacore SPR systems. Darius is interested in FBDD and the applications of various biophysical techniques (SPR, ITC, MS, NMR and X-ray crystallography) to tackle the occurring challenges.

Project: Development of FBLD techniques for Intrinsically Disordered Proteins
Industrial supervisor: Dr Ben Davis (Vernalis Research)