Jan Steyaert is a full professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), groupleader at the Vlaams Instituut Biotechnologie (VIB) and Research Director of the VIB-VUB center for Structural Biology.

Last years, the Steyaert lab pioneered the use of nanobodies for chaperone-assisted X-ray crystallography, 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 and on the applications of nanobodies in single particle cryo-EM.

He is also co-founder of Ablynx and Biotalys, and founder of ConFo Therapeutics, three successful biotech spin-offs that valorize single domain antibodies (nanobodies) derived from camels.