Dr. Steyaert obtained his PhD from the protein-engineering department at Plant Genetic Systems (currently Bayer Crop science). After completing post-doctoral training at the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, Kenya, he joined the laboratory of structural biology of Dr. Lode Wyns.

He is co-founder of Ablynx and Agrosafve and founder and senior advisor of Confo Therapeutics, three biotech spin-offs that are studying a unique family of single-domain antibodies (immune system cells), or nanobodies.

Last year, the Steyaert lab pioneered the use of nanobodies for chaperone-assisted X-ray crystallography (technique to determine crystal structure) to study membrane proteins, amyloidogenic proteins (cause protein clumping), and (transient) multi-protein complexes. Recent work has focused on exploiting the structural complexity of therapeutic targets for nanobody-enabled drug discovery.