DIETI Contact person / Partner: Mario Di Bernardo
Abstract
A key challenge for the development of personalized therapies is the ability of delivering drugs in situ and avoid unwanted side effects to the patients. A promising approach is the use of synthetically engineered cell populations with advanced functionalities whose collective behavior can be carefully controlled so that they can move to the target area and release some drug. This proposal focuses on the development of multicellular control strategies to create microbial consortia in which cell populations cooperate to realize this challenging goal. The project will be supervised by the proponent together with prof Brunetti and prof Surace at the Dept. of Translational Medicine and will involve active collaboration with leading groups at ETH and Bristol and the start-up companies at TIGEM.
Objectives
- Develop synthetic biology approaches for drug delivery based on multicellular consortia;
- Synthesize gene regulatory networks to implement the desired functions in vivo;
- Adopt and develop methods from ICT to achieve multicellular control of bacterial and mammalian cell populations;
- Carry out in-vivo validation using optogenetics and microfluidics platforms.
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Already assigned to a PhD student of cycle XXXV