Owen West Wins Goldwater Prize for His Role in Studying Self-Assembling Peptides

His lifelong passion for baseball led Owen West, a rising junior from Point Pleasant Beach majoring in biomedical engineering, to dive into pharmaceutical research and become one of two NJIT winners of the prestigious Goldwater Scholarship for 2024.

Growing up, all West wanted to do is pitch. “My entire life goal was a plan to be in the Major Leagues,” he said. He threw left-handed and grew to 6-feet, 6-inches, giving him two vital tools to make that dream come true. But upon joining NJIT’s Albert Dorman Honors college, he confirmed a nagging feeling that the worldview of student-researchers suited him better than that of scholar-athletes.

“I never identified with the winners or the losers in sports. I was there because I needed to see it happen. I just wanted to find out and learn about it. The way that I got good at baseball wasn’t from listening to coaches with 100% faith,” he explained. “I needed to know how pitching worked for myself. I loved learning about pitching.”

“I was on the baseball team and thinking about how exciting research sounded,” he said, describing it as an existential crisis. “I was going to research for the same reason that I loved baseball. It wasn’t that my love for baseball was going away.” There wasn’t enough time to do both, so he picked research. That’s also when he first heard of the Goldwater Scholarship and confidently decided he would make it a goal to win.

West’s academic interest in structural biology led him to work with Associate Professor Vivek Kumar, who develops tiny artificial proteins called self-assembling peptides. Most people know about the most famous natural peptide, which is insulin. West is working on making a self-assembling clone.

West elaborated with the same enthusiasm that he used to reserve for baseball: “You have proteins in your body. Proteins are made of amino acids. We can use those amino acids to make our own proteins. And if we learned about amino acids, and we learned about proteins enough, we can make really rational, informed guesses on how we make these peptides.”

“And one of the devices that comes out of that is a self-assembling peptide — which basically, if you have a jar of these peptides and you just have them in water, they'll just stick to each other and they'll form these fibers — and then that assembly will turn that liquid into a gel. What happens is you can inject that into someone's body, and then it'll go from liquid to gel in the body. And then you have this thing, this peptide-protein mask that the cells around an injury will grow onto, and that advance them towards turning into muscle and blood vessels.”

“Instead of thinking about biology in terms of events, or telling stories in terms of cells, it's saying we're going to use our ability to just look at structures the same way that an engineer looks at bridges. We're going to look at these molecules instead. And we're going to use, as an engineer would know about trusses, we know about peptide bonds and these linkages. We can construct our own building but very, very small. And it's really the same thing. I think what's really great about it is that there's no difference, in the intuitive sense, of how I'm thinking about little tiny molecules on a computer and how someone's thinking about a bridge.”

So, “I design peptides using computers. Basically, if you have a protein in your body that does a certain thing, and let's say we needed it to stop doing that thing, for example there could be a protein in your body that when it gets activated, it causes inflammation. If we can find that protein and we can get its structure and what it looks like, then we can design a peptide that will bind to it using what we know about protein interactions and everything. This stuff takes so many calculations, sampling of mutations and everything. You need big, big computer scripts to process all this stuff. So that's sort of what my job is. The other half is I'm just doing proof-of-concept for these peptides as I'm culturing cells, and incubating them with the stuff and then seeing, do they grow more? Do they signal more? Anything like that.”

Kumar provided an endorsement. “Dedication, drive and determination are the key talents that Owen embodies,” he stated. “From the first time he spoke to me to just yesterday, the zeal and fervor for invention and innovation that Owen has is palpable.”

Looking forward, West said he intends to pursue a Ph.D. in structural biology and hopes to develop life-changing medical treatments, in addition to following his recreational interests in philosophy and mental health.

“I want to develop new products and things that benefit humanity. I think by the time I graduate from NJIT, I’m going to have a few projects of designing new peptides and stuff,” he continued. “I think my goal is to do a Rhodes scholarship, because that would give me the type of independence that I want. I want to have a biotech company and I want to be a professor of biochemistry or microbiology.”