This event is open to staff and students across Imperial College London.
Hosted by Dr Yuval Elani, Department of Chemical Engineering, this presentation forms a part of his Lister Research Prize Fellowship, conferred by the Lister Institute.
Synthetic Cells as an Alternative Paradigm for Biological Engineering
Synthetic biology is poised to be one of the defining technologies of our time with the potential to transform how we treat disease, monitor our environments, and manufacture chemicals. Over recent decades, remarkable progress has been made in “re-engineering” living cells to give them new functions. However, engineering living systems differs fundamentally from the design of traditional engineered systems, such as software, electronics, or mechanical devices. Biology is impossibly complex, adaptive, and often unpredictable, making it a uniquely challenging medium for engineering. As we push toward more ambitious applications, these challenges are becoming increasingly apparent.
In this talk, I will describe our efforts to address these limitations by developing a new approach to engineering biology. Rather than modifying existing living cells, we seek to construct encapsulated chemical microsystems—synthetic cells—from first principles, starting from molecular building blocks. We aim to programme these synthetic cells with behaviours typically associated with living systems, such as communication, signalling, bioproduction, motility and stimulus–response. I will also discuss our microfluidic technologies for the scalable manufacture of synthetic cells and related lipid-based drug delivery systems.
Speaker bio:
Yuval Elani | About | Imperial College London