iSTARS Seminar – Engineering a human lung bacteria to treat lung diseases
Friday, 27th of September 2024
Aud.58, Egas Moniz Building, Faculty of Medicine, University of Lisbon
“How can synthetic biology transform the treatment of lung diseases?”
Professor Luis Serrano will be presenting the upcoming iSTARS seminar at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Lisbon.
Abstract:
The rapid advancement of synthetic and systems biology, driven by the genomic revolution, has unveiled new opportunities for harnessing microorganisms as a natural resource. Live biotherapeutics (LBs) represent a promising approach, involving the utilization of live microorganisms for the treatment, alleviation, or prevention of human diseases or conditions, including viruses and bacteria. The growing interest of the scientific community lies their capacity to adapt to the environment and synthesize multiple therapeutic agents on-site, resulting in diminished dosage requirements, fewer adverse effects, and lower production costs. Two distinct fields have emerged: one focusing on modifying bacterial communities locally to treat specific diseases (e.g., using skin bacteria for atopic dermatitis treatment), while the other capitalizes on mounting evidence supporting the relationship between the gut microbiome and other organ's function, known as the gut-organ axes. Here I will present the work we have done over the years to develop a genome reduced bacteria that causes mild pneumonia in humans as a lung therapeutic agent (Mycochassis). Mycochassis is non pathogenic in mouse and pigs, thanks to the lack of a cell wall it can secreted folded cytoquines chemoquines, nanobodies, enzymes and scFVs and has shown to have therapeutic effect in Lung infection and inflammation. By combining protein engineering with Mycochassis, we could optimize the bacterial dose to achieve maximum biological response.
About the speaker:
Luis Serrano received his PhD in Cell Biology at the Centro de Biología Molecular of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 1985. He spent 4 years in the laboratory of Professor A.R. Fersht, at the Medical Research Council, in the United Kingdom, where he focused his research on protein folding.
In 1993 he was appointed Head of Group at the European Laboratory of Molecular Biology, in Heidelberg, Germany, and focused his work on protein folding and design. In the following years at the EMBL, he was named Senior Principal Investigator and Head of the Structural & Computational Biology programme.
In 2006 he was named Head of programme at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO). At the end of 2006, he moved to Spain to direct the Systems Biology programme at the Centre for Genomic Regulation, where he also served as deputy director until his appointment as director on July 2011.
He is member of the Spanish Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, member of the European Molecular Biology Organization, and member of the Royal Spanish Academy of Sciences (Spain). In 2003 he received the Marie Curie Excellence Award, in 2009 he was awarded the City of Barcelona prize (science category) and in 2018 the Francisco Cobos award.
He has published more than 380 publications, won three ERC Advanced Grants and three ERC Proof of Concept grants. He is Professor of ICREA and has directed 20 PhD thesis. He was involved in the creation of one of the first Spanish Biotech Companies (Diverdrugs) in 1999. He is also co-founder of Cellzome, EnVivo, TRISKEL, Pulmobiotics and Orikine biotech companies. He has been Director and Founder of the association of European Institutes of Excellence EU-LIFE (https://eu-life.eu/) and of the association of Spanish institutes of excellence, Severo Ochoa and Maria de Maeztu.
See you there!
