Protein binding sites
Development of ProBiS methods for detecting and comparing structurally similar binding sites independently of global sequence or fold.
Founder
Janez Konc
Structural bioinformatician developing computational methods for protein-centered drug discovery, with a particular focus on protein binding sites, molecular docking, genetic variants and graph algorithms.
Full Professor of Bioinformatics
University of Primorska, FAMNIT
Associate Professor of Medicinal Chemistry
University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Pharmacy
Senior Research Associate
National Institute of Chemistry, Theory Department
Research
Research focus
Drug discovery & docking
Computational approaches for ligand prediction, molecular docking and the identification of pharmaceutically relevant protein targets.
Variants & structural proteomics
Mapping genetic variants and ligand-binding information onto experimental PDB structures and AlphaFold models of the human proteome.
Graph algorithms
Exact and heuristic graph-theoretical algorithms for difficult optimization problems arising in structural bioinformatics and molecular modeling.
Career
Selected milestones
2024
Full Professor of Bioinformatics
Faculty of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Information Technologies, University of Primorska.
2020–2024
Principal investigator of COGEVAB
Led the ARRS/FWO project New Computational Tools at the Molecular Scale for Studying Effects of Genetic Variants on Drug Binding.
2019
INSILAB LLC
Became Chief Executive Officer of the National Institute of Chemistry spin-out created to develop computational methods into services and commercial products.
2018
Associate Professor of Medicinal Chemistry
Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Ljubljana.
2016
Senior Research Associate
Theory Department, National Institute of Chemistry. Also served as Associate Professor of Bioinformatics at the University of Primorska from 2016 to 2021.
2013–2014
Fulbright award
Research at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA.
2012
Outstanding scientific achievement
The ProBiS-2012 web-server work was recognized by the Slovenian Research Agency as an outstanding scientific achievement in Natural Sciences and Mathematics.
2010
ProBiS algorithm
Published the ProBiS local structural-alignment algorithm in Bioinformatics; the paper was later recognized as a Web of Science Highly Cited Paper.
2008
Ph.D. in Pharmacy
University of Ljubljana.
2004
B.S. in Pharmacy
University of Ljubljana. The bachelor's research thesis received a Krka award.