Tuesday, October 13, 2020
11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Hosted by Professor Kyle Lauersen
On Zoom
Join us for a lecture by Prof. Matthew W. Chang entitled: “Engineering biology — from biomanufacturing to living machines.”
This lecture is co-Affiliated with the BioE Seminar Series.
Abstract
Synthetic biology aims to engineer genetically modified biological systems that perform novel functions that do not exist in nature, with reusable, standard interchangeable biological parts. The use of these standard biological parts enables the exploitation of common engineering principles such as standardization, decoupling, and abstraction for synthetic biology. With this engineering framework in place, synthetic biology has the potential to make the construction of novel biological systems a predictable, reliable, systematic process. While the development of most synthetic biological systems remains largely ad hoc, recent efforts to implement an engineering framework in synthetic biology have provided long-awaited evidences that engineering principles can facilitate the construction of novel biological systems. Synthetic biology has so far demonstrated that its framework can be applied to a wide range of areas such as energy, environment, and health care. In this talk, our recent development of auto-regulatory genetic circuits for microbial refineries and therapeutics will be presented. A particular emphasis will be placed on our efforts to transform microbes into live biotherapeutics with prophylactic and therapeutic efficacy against pathogenic infections and chronic metabolic diseases. This work provides a strong foundation for engineering microbes to modulate host-microbiome interactions and supports the use of live biotherapeutics as a viable strategy for clinical intervention.
About the speaker
Matthew Chang is Director of the Singapore Consortium for Synthetic Biology (SINERGY), Wilmar-NUS Corporate Laboratory (WIL@NUS) and NUS Synthetic Biology for Clinical and Technological Innovation (SynCTI), and Associate Professor in Biochemistry and Synthetic Biology in the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore. His research focuses on studying the engineering of biology to develop autonomous, programmable cells for biomedical and biomanufacturing applications. His scientific contributions have been recognized with honours and awards, including the National Research Foundation of Singapore Investigatorship Award, NUHS-Mochtar Riady Pinnacle Research Excellence Award, the Korean Federation of Science and Technology Societies Presidential Award and the Scientific and Technological Achievement Award from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He is an author of over 100 scientific publications and serves as an editor and editorial board member for over 15 biotechnology journals. He co-led the establishment of the Asian Synthetic Biology Association (ASBA) and the Global Biofoundry Alliance (GBA) and serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Synthetic Biology. He has trained over 50 undergraduate and high school students, 20 Ph.D. students and 40 research scientists, many now in leadership roles in academia, government and industry.