# The Quest to Measure Protein Function with Polly Fordyce, Stanford

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/mendelspod-podcast-742570/the-quest-to-measure-protein-function-with-polly-fordyce-stanford
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/mendelspod-podcast-742570/the-quest-to-measure-protein-function-with-polly-fordyce-stanford.md
Podcast: [Mendelspod Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/mendelspod-podcast-742570)
Published: 2026-09-03T16:40:41+00:00
Episode link: https://www.mendelspod.com/p/the-quest-to-measure-protein-function
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/213731753/fcba8021fa8712682ef7e74af180c625.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/mendelspod-podcast-742570/episodes/the-quest-to-measure-protein-function-with-polly-fordyce-stanford
Duration seconds: 1897

## Resource

Stanford physicist and bioengineer Polly Fordyce has a big vision. She’s attempting to measure protein function at the scale at which we learned to measure DNA. We can sequence proteins. We can increasingly predict their structures. But we still have a surprisingly difficult time measuring what proteins actually do. Fordyce wants to change that. Her lab is developing ways to measure protein folding, binding, kinetics and function at a massive scale, using the quantitative language of physics. Her ambition is not simply to create more protein data. She wants measurements good enough to make biology more predictive. Her favorite analogy is weather forecasting. Better computers and better models helped transform our ability to predict the weather. But so did thousands of weather stations around the world making standardized measurements of temperature, wind and precipitation. Biology now has extraordinary computational power and increasingly powerful models. Fordyce thinks it needs the equivalent of those weather stations. Last year, Schmidt Sciences awarded Fordyce a Polymath Award worth up to $2.5 million to pursue that idea. Her lab has developed a new bead based technology that could allow ordinary laboratories to make high throughput measurements of protein function. Fordyce hopes scientists around the world will contribute those measurements to a new open resource she calls the Functional Protein Observatory. The implications go well beyond building a database. Fordyce describes recent work from her lab on a protein involved in cancer and developmental disease. After making hundreds of thousands of measurements across human variants, the researchers found that the prevailing model for how drugs act on the protein may be wrong. The drugs appeared to stabilize a previ…

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