UK-Europe collaborations harness biology for engineering
Four research projects will use biological processes to discover new classes of medicines
Four new research projects with funding of £1.5m from the UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) will develop a new approach to antibiotic production, power generation for very small mechanical components, new classes of medicines and innovative techniques to study cell biology.
Teams of researchers from the UK and elsewhere in Europe will use synthetic biology to design systems with usefully engineered properties that are based on biology, or that use an engineering approach to pick apart a complex biological process.
The projects are funded under the EuroSYNBIO Programme, which is part of the European Science Foundation's European Collaborative Research Scheme (EUROCORES).
Professor Janet Allen, BBSRC director of research, said: ‘Our understanding of biological systems is increasing all the time and sometimes we have observed a process in biology that chemists or physicists have struggled to engineer for years. Sometimes it is possible to mimic biology in the lab – to synthesise new antibiotics for example – but now that we have the tools to be able to harness useful biological processes we can do this sort of thing much more efficiently, at a lower cost, and with a greater potential to discover brand new products. These four projects open up some exciting possibilities for using a synthetic biology approach to answer important questions in biological sciences and its applications.’
In a project led by University of Technology in Dresden, Dr Richard Berry's team at the University of Oxford will also partner with teams from, University of Basel, University of Berne, ETH Zurich and Universidad Autonoma de Madrid as the NANOCELL consortium. NANOCELL aims to develop components for bio-nanotechnology, such as microscopic propellers driven by biological rotary motors that would allow components of tiny biochemical factories to move under their own power.
Dr Philip Holliger will lead a project based at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology Cambridge with partners from Catholic University of Leuven, University of Bonn and Genoscope in France. The project is to develop synthetic biology methods for producing medicines known as aptamers that are based on nucleic acids (such as RNA and DNA) that have characteristics that are not found naturally. These medicines can be developed such that they target specific RNA, DNA or protein molecules in the body for therapeutic applications. Aptamer technology is already used as a medicine for treating macular degeneration - one of the leading causes of blindness in older people.
The University of Technology Dresden will lead the third project in which Professor David Sherratt's team at the University of Oxford will also partner with a team from Delf University of technology. The three groups of researchers will use an engineering approach to understand how proteins that control cell division behave inside a living cell, and in particular where exactly they are found and how they interact with other cell components.
In the fourth project led by the University of Groningen in The Netherlands, Dr Nicolas Szita's team at University College London will also partner with teams from ETH Zurich, Eberhard Karls University Tubingen, University of Regensburg and the Organisation for International Dialogue and Conflict Management in Vienna. The researchers will work together to identify and then produce new antibiotics by integrating synthetic biology techniques with bioprocess engineering.
Dr Lesley Thompson, EPSRC Director of Research said: ‘The ultimate ambition of the field is to extend the mastery of biological engineering to systems complex enough to deal with grand challenges such as the design, synthesis and delivery of novel therapeutic treatments, affordable and precise diagnosis of diseases, novel routes to vaccines, fuel production, bioremediation of pollutants, biocompatible carbon sequestration, and efficient manufacturing of biopharmaceuticals and biochemicals. We hope to transform biotechnology into a true engineering discipline with the corresponding properties of reliability and accuracy in design.’
