Last years, the Steyaert lab pioneered the use of nanobodies for chaperone-assisted X-ray crystallography (www.steyaertlab.eu), aiming at the highest hanging fruits of structural biology including membrane proteins, amyloidogenic proteins, and now also (transient) multiprotein complexes. The elucidation of the first GPCR structures in the agonist-bound active state demonstrate the power of Nanobodies to stabilize G protein coupled receptor conformational states including transmembrane signalling complexes. Recent work focusses on exploiting the conformational complexity of therapeutic targets for Nanobody-enabled drug discovery.

Appart of his research activities, Jan Steyaert is also a  serial entrepreneur. He is a co-founder of Ablynx (now a Sanofi company) and Biotalys and more recently he founded ConfoTherapeutics, three succesful biotech spin-offs that valorize a unique class of single domain antibodies (Nanobodies) derived from camelids.