Alke Meents to be awarded the Bjørn H. Wiik Prize 2022

Whenever the conversations at DESY turned to coronavirus research, his name was usually mentioned in the same breath: Alke Meents. During the early stages of the pandemic, the CFEL physicist had already launched a promising and internationally acclaimed research project at DESY’s X-ray source PETRA III in search of a drug against Covid. This year, Alke Meents is being awarded the Bjørn H. Wiik Prize for this outstanding achievement. However, the recognition goes far beyond this project alone!

Awardee Alke Meents at the PETRA III experimental station P11. Photo: DESY, Christina Mänz

According to Jörg Rossbach, chair of the Bjørn H. Wiik Prize Committee, “Alke Meents has a much broader background than just Covid research. He has taken a leading role in continuing to refine an experimental method for determining the structure of complex proteins, crystallography. Internationally, he is one of the most innovative scientists in this field!”

Alke Meents joined DESY in 2001, as a PhD student at the Hamburg Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, HASYLAB. Eight years later, he was responsible for planning, building and operating the PETRA III beamline, P11, where he installed an innovative robotic system for fully automated experiments and performed the first measurements of protein structures at PETRA III. “He was among the first to develop high-speed scanning of crystals on chips for serial crystallography – a ground-breaking new approach that is now used in almost all synchrotron facilities throughout the world,” the award committee notes in its acclaim.

For Alke Meents, too, the beamline P11 is a highlight of his research career so far. “I invested a lot of energy, putting my heart and soul into it,” says the physicist looking back. “We implemented many new and innovative concepts, back then, relying from the start on automating the measurements. That’s why, more than ten years later, P11 is still a very fast beamline at which we were able, for the first time, to examine several thousand crystals in just a few weeks in search of a Covid drug.”

At the beginning of 2020, Alke Meents began the extensive X-ray screening at the P11 beamline. Thousands of samples of existing active substances were tested to see whether they would bind to a key protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and could thus serve as a basis for a drug against Covid. By April 2021, 37 active substances had been identified, a result that was also published in the renowned scientific journal “Science”. The most promising candidate drug is now being investigated in more detail in preclinical trials.

Meanwhile, Alke Meents is putting a lot of energy into his new pet project: the electron accelerator REGAE, which uses ultra-short electron pulses to examine samples. “Compared with X-rays, electrons can, for example, be used to examine much smaller samples, causing less radiation damage. While most such experiments are carried out using comparatively small, commercially available electron microscopes, they can also be conducted using REGAE at DESY with a high time resolution, much like that of an X-ray laser. This permits a better understanding of enzyme reactions, for example. That’s why I see great potential in REGAE.”

Alke Meents is now being awarded the Bjørn H. Wiik Prize 2022 for his multifaceted research. “This is a very great acknowledgement of my work and of course of the work of my research group, without which I would never have achieved this.” What makes him particularly happy? “The fact that for a change this prize is recognizing both technical and methodological developments.”

The Bjørn H. Wiik Prize is DESY’s most important science prize. It is endowed with 3000 euros and is awarded at DESY’s Science Day in memory of the Chairman of DESY’s Board of Directors, Bjørn H. Wiik, who died in 1999. This year’s event will take place on 23 November.