Pipettes

CDT News and Events

Industry Day 2021

We have scheduled our second annual Industry Day for Friday 10th September - more details to follow soon - register your interest here

 

UN Convention on Biological Diversity 

A group of CDT students prepared a report responding to the open peer review of the Technical Series on Synthetic Biology for the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. Their reponse can be read here.

 

2021 recruitment closed

We have completed the recruitment process for our 2021 cohort and are excited for the new group to start their MRes studies at Imperial in October. We will open the call for 2022 projects in October and our student recruitment process will run from December 2021 to March 2022.

 

2021 recruitment open

We opened recruitment for our next cohort due to begin in October 2021: 13 projects across Imperial, UCL and the University of Manchester, ranging from biosensors to circular RNA, microfluidic platforms and light activated shape-changing tissues. Applications close on Sunday January 17th - so don't miss out!

 

MRes graduation

 Our first cohort of students graduated from their Master's of Research degrees in a remote ceremony. They have all now moved on to their PhD projects - we wish them the best of luck as they move to the next stage of the CDT programme.

 

Industry Day 2020

The CDT held its first annual Industry Day on 11th September 2020. This was an opportunity to meet with 20+ academics from the CDT as well as network with others from industry working in this exciting and emerging field. We hosted talks from the academic leads giving you an overview of their work and potential projects that industrial partners could collaborate in, followed by one to one partnering meetings with academics to develop these ideas further.

 

iGEM 2020 

The CDT is sponsoring a team of students from Imperial College London to enter this year's International Genetically Engineering Machine (iGEM) competition. In iGEM, students teams develop their own projects to meet challenges in the wider world, in the process using and developing standardised tools for the engineering of biological systems. The projects, completed over the summer, are hard work, but very rewarding. Imperial first entered an iGEM team in 2006, and we have consistently been represented by talented teams with innovative projects ranging from water purification solutions, to drug delivery mechanisms, to soil erosion preventions.

 

Student BioFoundry launch 

In December we opened the Student BioFoundry at Imperial College London.Students will have full access to six state of the art Opentrons OT-2 robots, as well as plate readers and other lab equipment. Students on the Master's of Research in Systems and Synthetic Biology will complete a module in automation using the robots, which can be programmed to automate hundreds of different lab functions.


SBUK 2019

The CDT cohort attended the Synthetic Biology UK conference at Warwick University on 9-10 December. For many of our students this was their first chance to attend a scientific conference. With two days of presentations and posters sessions, a wide range of cutting-edge work in Synthetic Biology was on show.  

 

 

BioMod 2019

The CDT sponsored a team in the annual BioMod biomolecular design competition for students. Here's an update from the team:

Traditionally, chemotherapeutic drugs are administered intravenously and circulate freely throughout the body. This inevitably kills healthy cells along with cancer cells, leading to some of the unwanted side effects of chemotherapy. Additionally, high dosage and systemic administration desensitises cancer cells, potentially leading to drug resistance. Our solution is to package the drug payload within large, unilamellar vesicles (LUVs) containing a membrane-embedded DNA nanopore. The nanopore responds to the presence of cancer-associated proteases in the immediate vicinity of the tumour, selectively releasing the drug to kill cancer cells. This is achieved by a peptide-oligonucleotide conjugate (POC) that can trigger a downstream toehold displacement reaction to open the DNA nanopore. The nanopore could be customisable towards a variety of protein biomarkers and disease contexts. This novel cancer drug delivery system could minimise the proclivity towards drug resistance and side effects of future chemotherapy treatments. 

The team won the following awards: Gold project award, 2nd place overall, 2nd best website, 2nd best video, 3rd best presentation

Video: youtu.be/Q-2sD256jyk

Website: nanodips.github.io/website