| Outcome/accomplishment:
The International Genetically Modified Machines (iGEM) competition
is a program in which students learn how to build biological systems from
standard, interchangeable parts over the course of a summer. Organized
by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the support of the NSF-funded
Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC), based at the University
of California-Berkeley, the program continues to expand its reach.
Impact/benefits: In
2010, this program for high school, undergraduate, and graduate students
from around the world engaged 1,700 students in 112 teams from 21 countries
in research and innovation in synthetic biology. This helps fulfill
SynBERC’s goal of exciting and preparing the next generation of professionals
for the synthetic biotech field.
Explanation/ background:
Teams of students are provided with kits of standardized biological parts,
or BioBricks, from the MIT Registry of Standard Biological Parts.
Students use these parts, together with parts of their own design, to build
biological systems that accomplish a particular task. At the end
of the program, the teams travel to MIT to interact with other students
and share their results in a juried, weekend-long competition.
The team from SynBERC partner
MIT won awards at the November 2010 iGEM competition for Best Manufacturing
Project and the iGEMers Prize, a new award given to five teams and voted
on by all participating teams as the best projects in the competition.
The MIT team, called “Programmable,
Self-Constructing Biomaterials,” set out to produce adaptive, living biomaterials
that can be reliably controlled in two different systems: mammalian cells
and bacteria. Their systems were judged to be remarkable because
they translate a macroscale input into a pattern that emerges from the
growth and re-modeling of cells. This technology has applications
in the field of self-repairing nanotechnology and medicine.
The team from the University
of California-San Francisco, another SynBERC partner, entitled “Synthetic
Killers - Engineering Immune Cells for Cancer Therapy,” focused on improving
the specificity and killing efficiency of cytotoxic cells of the immune
system that identify certain cancer cells and virally infected cells and
kill them. By using synthetic biology tools and “logic gates” design,
this team aimed to create newly engineered synthetic devices with the potential
to enhance current adaptive cell-based immunotherapy for cancer patients. |
