Even before the new variant of the corona virus put the world on hold, Hendrik Dietz, Professor of Biomolecular Nanotechnologyat the Physics Department of the Technical University of Munich, and his team were working on the construction of virus-sized objects that assemble themselves.
In 1962, the biologist Donald Caspar and the biophysicist Aaron Klug discovered the geometrical principles according to which the protein envelopes of viruses are built. Based on these geometric specifications, the team around Hendrik Dietz at the Technical University of Munich, supported by Seth Fraden and Michael Hagan from Brandeis University in the USA, developed a concept that made it possible to produce artificial hollow bodies the size of a virus.
In the summer of 2019, the team asked whether such hollow bodies could also be used as a kind of “virus trap”. If they were to be lined with virus-binding molecules on the inside, they should be able to bind viruses tightly and thus be able to take them out of circulation. For this, however, the hollow bodies would also have to have sufficiently large openings through which viruses can get into the shells.
“None of the objects that we had built using DNA origami technology at that time would have been able to engulf a whole virus – they were simply too small,” says Hendrik Dietz in retrospect. “Building stable hollow bodies of this size was a huge challenge.”