Biologically Inspired Engineering, synbio, synthetic biology, crispr
Staff 
What is life? For much of the 20th century, this question did not particularly concern biologists. Life is a term for poets, not scientists, argued the synthetic biologist Andrew Ellington in 2008, who began his career studying how life began. Despite Ellington’s reservations, the related fields of origins-of-life research and astrobiology have renewed focus on … Read more
The word “army” typically conjures up images of ground warfare. As the military’s DARPA program proves, some key innovations we enjoy today have emerged from military efforts. Here is an example of the U.S. Army aiming to deliver a way to use gene editing to convert waste materials into something useful. As part of an … Read more
Proteins are the workhorses of the cell. Mapping the precise shapes of the most important of these workhorses helps to unlock their life-supporting functions or, in the case of disease, potential for dysfunction. While the amino acid sequence of a protein provides the basis for its 3D structure, deducing the atom-by-atom map from principles of … Read more
Immuneering Corp. applies translational bioinformatics to drug development. Its biopharmaceutical therapeutic focus is oncologic and neurologic diseases. The company has more than a decade of experience in translational bioinformatics that it believes allow it to generate superior insights into drug mechanisms of action and patient treatment responses. Immuneering has developed a disease-agnostic platform for human … Read more
For years, the foundations of cancer treatment were surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy. Over the last two decades, targeted therapies like imatinib (Gleevec®) and trastuzumab (Herceptin®) —drugs that target cancer cells by homing in on specific molecular changes seen primarily in those cells—have also cemented themselves as standard treatments for many cancers. But over the past several years, immunotherapy—therapies that enlist and … Read more
There is a fundamental problem at the heart of all cancers: cells that won’t stop dividing, or hyperproliferation, along with genomic instability. This runaway growth is what forms a tumor, and the abnormal cellular processes that drive this growth also thwarts therapies that target cancer cells. Despite more than six decades of research into the … Read more
The number of STEM jobs — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — is in a secular growth storm, having sped past the number of non-STEM jobs by three times since 2000. Students pursuing STEM education will be positioned to benefit from the wave of innovations in synthetic biology. And experts say there might not be enough graduates in those fields to fill … Read more
Absci Corp describes itself as an AI-powered integrated drug creation platform. The company creates protein-based drugs (biologics) by unifying biologic drug discovery and cell line development into one process. This places Absci squarely under the umbrella of synthetic biology. The challenge in next-generation biologics is the linear steps needed to screen and select desired molecular … Read more
Students of synthetic biology soon discover that living things are more adaptive and creative than most people ever imagined. According to Perry Marshall in his book, Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design, “Darwinists underestimate nature and Creationists underestimate God.” Cells forming symbiotic relationships and communicating in complex ways suggests limitations to the … Read more
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) is seeking commercial partners interested in developing a powerful new class of chemical probes that are capable of strongly inhibiting or inducing quorum sensing. Quorum sensing is a process used by some bacteria to coordinate behavior based on local population density. To communicate, bacteria release signaling molecules, including low … Read more