When art meets science

Published on 20/01/2021

The members of the protein design group in Basel are still chuckling when thinking back to the moment their team leader Thomas Huber told them about his intention to work with American media artist Lynn Hershman.

“We were really surprised to work with an artist. It was something new for us,” says Agostino Cirillo, who works in Huber’s protein design unit in Basel together with Kathrin Mueller and Lionello Ruggeri.

As part of their daily work, the team’s main task is to create and test new therapeutic antibodies for treating diseases such as cancer and other complex conditions. Collaborating with Hershman, they had no idea what awaited them. “We didn’t know anything about the structure of the project and what we should do. But we were all interested.”

Thomas Huber was taken aback himself when Hershman approached him in late 2017. While Huber appreciates art and had worked as a volunteer in local museums during his time as an undergraduate, entering the art arena was a whole new ball game for the 42-year-old bioengineer.

For Hershman, mixing art and science came almost naturally, as the 77-year-old performance and media artist had tapped into scientific and technological findings since her early days as an artist.

“Artists want to be relevant to their time,” Hershman says about art in general. “So, I decided not to do painting and drawing, which I was trained in. Instead, I started to use interactive technology in the 1970s, which nobody was doing – and sound, which nobody had done.”

Later, she experimented with computer technology. In the 1990s, she was one of the first artists to tinker with artificial intelligence, creating Agent ­Ruby’s Dream Portal, a website on which users could type questions to a messaging bot that would readily answer them.

A few years later, after more than 16 years of work, she created DiNA. The artificial intelligence was equipped with a voice synthesizer and other top-notch technology, allowing DiNA to enter into real conversations with the public – political or otherwise.

Hershman’s love affair with science, in fact, has been running deep throughout her life. Coming from a family of scientists – she herself is a biology major – the artist had collaborated with some of the world’s greatest researchers and had produced films with Nobel Prize winners such as Elizabeth Blackburn, who discovered the effect of telomeres.

For her 2018 show in Basel’s House of Electronic Arts, Hershman wanted to work together with yet another scientist with whom she could develop an art object that revolves around the ideas of technology and identity, themes she had pursued for years.

The idea to work with ­Novartis came from her daughter. “When I knew I was going to do a project in Basel, I said I want to do something with a pharmaceutical company. But I didn’t know what was going on. So I asked my daughter, who’s the director of cancer research at Columbia, and she says, ‘Oh, it’s antibodies.’ And then she mentioned ­Novartis was doing a lot of the most advanced research. And so that’s how it all happened.”

A quirky idea

Over a cup of coffee, Hershman and Huber discussed a potential collaboration and finally hit upon the idea to produce an antibody that would carry the artist’s name, so to speak.

In a nutshell, Huber suggested redesigning the flexible part of an antibody, the so-called binding region. This relatively small part of the Y-shaped protein is responsible for connecting and neutralizing a disease-carrying molecule.

He wanted to code this region with a specific sequence of amino acids, which are standardly abbreviated with letters of the alphabet – such as L for leucine and H for histidine. This, so his reasoning, would allow him to produce an antibody with an amino acid sequence that would spell L Y N N   H E R S H M A N.

Now it was the artist’s turn to be taken aback – and she excitedly accepted Huber’s proposal.

Wow, antibodies!

Huber, who had joined Novartis in 2007 from the University of Zurich, where he had completed his Ph.D. in biochemistry, was always fascinated with antibodies, which are naturally produced in the blood in response to an antigen.

“When I first learned about antibodies, this was really amazing to me,” he says. “How can our body fight pathogens which it has never seen before?”

“In our body,” he says, “there is a constant evolution going on and a huge number of diverse antibodies is constantly being generated. The few useful ones are selected for refinement and production. The others are discarded because they could harm us. This process of making the right antibody to fight only foreign intruders fascinated me a lot.”

Antibodies have been used in medicine since the 18th century. But only with the rise of genetic engineering in the 1970s and the growing understanding of the complex structure of proteins did the field really take off.

The mid-1980s saw the development of the first biologic drugs. These would work like natural antibodies. Yet, thanks to their design, these therapeutic proteins would be able to fight diseases such as cancer or inflammation.

Novartis, which was among the early adopters of antibody research more than 30 years ago, has since developed four large-molecule drugs, including anti-inflammatory medicine Ilaris®, psoriasis treatment Cosentyx® and asthma treatment Xolair®.

As part of regular antibody research, scientists first try to establish a drug target and then attempt to discover a therapeutic antibody with an amino acid sequence that enables interaction with an established disease trigger, a process that can take years.

In the case of Lynn Hershman’s antibody, Huber’s team turned the process upside down. They first created the antibody with the predefined amino acid sequence and then tested its binding properties against a set of 7000 potential antigen targets.

The chances of the Lynn Hershman antibody having any therapeutic value were low from the start. But this was not what attracted Huber to work with Hershman. With the collaboration, Huber was reaching for something more elusive.

“An artist has a very different perspective on the matter. They can express science in a different way than we do, because we are often limited by the complexity of the material, which does not make it very easy to show other people what we are doing,” Huber says.

“To explain our work is a big need and we actually love to do that. So, when Lynn Hershman expressed an interest in joining us and learning more about the antibody process, I was really delighted that I could explain to her what we are doing, based on her antibody, and that she was able to take this up and present it in a way that I would never have thought of.”

Making it visible

Hershman’s ability to translate complex ideas and scientific findings into objects of art has made her one of the most respected media artists of our time. While her work initially found little resonance with the broad public, the artist steadily gained a growing international reputation over the years. Not surprisingly, her show in Basel’s House of Electronic Arts attracted a lot of interest as people flocked to the exhibition to learn more about the societal impact of new technologies.

“Art has always reflected the world since time immemorial,” says Sabine Himmelsbach, the director of the House of Electronic Arts. “Lynn Hershman is exceptional because she has done pioneering work in so many fields, including video, artificial intelligence and now biotechnology.”

A few years back, Hershman had already created an installation called Infinity Engine, for which she built a large-scale replica of a genetics lab together with biohacker Josiah Zayner.

As part of the collaboration with Huber, she envisaged a visible sample of the antibody. This would be shown in a clean room together with a vial of Hershman’s DNA, which the artist used as a storage medium on which to save the whole exhibition.

Generating the antibody was difficult and was highly likely to fail. So, Huber says, it was a huge relief when the team was finally able to produce the powdery sample with the Lynn Hershman protein. All the while, everyone involved wondered whether the Lynn Hershman antibody would have any therapeutic use.

When the final testing day came, the results took everyone by surprise: While the Lynn Hershman antibody bound to many antigens and was too diverse to be used in any therapeutic setting, the team also produced a negative control antibody which did not interact with any of the 7000 antigens against which it was tested. Called Erta in reference to Lynn Hershman’s artistic avatar Roberta Breitmore, this antibody turned out to be a rarity.

“The Lynn Hershman antibody gives a quite diverse pattern and seems to bind to many proteins, albeit with weak affinity,” Huber said, when unveiling the results to Hershman. Erta, meanwhile, was different. “We did the same test with Erta, which did not bind to anything. Erta for us seems a perfect negative control.”

Negative control antibodies are crucial for establishing whether a therapeutic antibody is working properly. With this test, researchers want to make sure that the flexible part of the protein and not the so-called protein scaffold is mediating the effect. Finding such an unresponsive protein is like hitting the jackpot!

“We should probably work with the Erta antibody going forward, because it seems to be a fantastic negative control,” Huber told Hershman. “We may file an application for this. Let’s see what happens.”

Openness and curiosity

For Hershman, the collaboration with Huber was a success too, as it was further proof for her of how far curiosity and openness can take an artist or a scientist.

“It’s a matter of curiosity in how you want to spend your life,” Hershman said about entering a new field and collaborating with people outside one’s own field. “If you want to spend your life safely, then you limit your choices. If you have no boundaries and just want to go with ideas and push ideas as far as you can, then you find a way to do it. And usually things respond, as in the collaboration with Thomas.”

Most good scientists, she believes, tick like this and are open to art. “The best scientists are open to art. The best. I can’t qualify that enough.”

Huber and his team certainly belong to this group by now. The willingness to go down an adventurous road not only brought them an entry in the annals of art. Hitting upon Erta, they have discovered a negative control antibody that may help Novartis speed up drug development in future.

A few months after they unveiled the antibody to Hershman, some NIBR colleagues used Erta for the first time as a control antibody for an ongoing research project.

A powdery sample of Erta, meanwhile, is also on show in Germany as one of the 100 masterpieces of media art. A product of art and science, Erta is yet to surprise more and more people.