Nearly a year ago, one of the largest single investments in protein science took root in Denmark. In August 2025, the University of Copenhagen opened the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Design, built on a grant of 700 million Danish kroner, roughly 109 million US dollars, from the Novo Nordisk Foundation. At its head sits Professor Dek Woolfson, a Fellow of the Royal Society and a familiar voice at American Peptide Symposia.
The center sets out to design proteins from first principles, engineering new sequences that fold into structures and functions nature never evolved. Woolfson and his colleagues build on a field that the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry brought into full view, honoring both the prediction of protein structure from sequence and the design of proteins from scratch on a computer. Copenhagen now aims to carry that work into a new chapter.
What makes the center unusual is its reach across the university. It draws together biologists, chemists, drug designers, and computer scientists, with its main operation shared between the Department of Biology and the Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology, and further activity in Chemistry and Computer Science. The departments sit within walking distance of one another in Innovation District Copenhagen, a proximity meant to turn separate disciplines into a single working group.
Illustration based on architectural photography of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Design, Copenhagen; laboratory glassware added digitally.
For Woolfson, Copenhagen marks an expansion rather than a departure. He keeps his chair in chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Bristol, where he pioneered de novo protein design and led the BrisSynBio synthetic biology center, and now holds a joint appointment between Bristol and Copenhagen. The arrangement places a British structural chemist at the heart of a Danish national ambition.
The model itself carries a quiet significance. A private philanthropic foundation has committed more than 100 million dollars to a public university, betting that designed proteins will reshape medicine, materials, and environmental science in the decades ahead. Few academic centers anywhere begin life with resources on this scale or a mandate this broad.
For all its scale, the center is still settling into its physical home. As Woolfson puts it, "We haven't had the official inauguration of the CPD yet and moved into our new labs and offices just a month ago." The funding and the leadership were in place well before the labs were ready, and the formal inauguration will mark the moment the center's work fully begins.
A year in, the Center for Protein Design stands as one of the clearest signals yet that protein design has moved from promising idea to global priority. For the peptide community, and for the many who know Woolfson from our symposia stages, it is well worth watching.
