Objective
Bacteria are among the most brilliant chemists on Earth. They are capable of producing a wealth of structurally diverse natural products with a wide range of applications in medicine, such as the treatment of infections and cancer. The synthetic production of microbial natural products and their transformation into pharmaceutical drugs is often a challenging, costly and time-consuming process due to the structural complexity of these molecules and the difficulties associated with drug solubility and formulation.
An emerging new strategy in disease treatment aims to exploit beneficial intestinal microbes for local drug production and delivery. Such commensal bacteria are safe, can be administered easily, and can be engineered to detect diseases and release drugs in adequate local concentrations. However, the current therapeutic platform or chassis strains cannot stably colonize the human gut and have so far only been engineered to produce therapeutic proteins, such as hormones or cytokines. As a result, no commensal chassis strains are available to treat chronic intestinal diseases or to produce clinically important natural product therapeutics.
In MiStiC, I propose to revolutionize microbial therapy systems by developing the beneficial, stable and prominent gut colonizer Clostridium leptum as an innovative and superior chassis for long-term health monitoring and chronic disease treatment. I will combine my expertise in molecular microbiology, enzyme engineering and natural product biosynthesis to equip the chassis with a nanobody-based biosensor and biocontainment modules, and optimize it for the expression of natural product biosynthetic pathways. As a proof-of-concept, we will implement these tools and chassis strains for the detection and treatment of colorectal cancer.
Together, these innovations will have broad translational applications and will pave the way to a new frontier in the field of microbiome engineering and synthetic microbial therapy systems
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringsensorsbiosensors
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmicrobiologybacteriology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomoleculesproteins
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicineoncology
You need to log in or register to use this function
We are sorry... an unexpected error occurred during execution.
You need to be authenticated. Your session might have expired.
Thank you for your feedback. You will soon receive an email to confirm the submission. If you have selected to be notified about the reporting status, you will also be contacted when the reporting status will change.
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
9052 ZWIJNAARDE - GENT
Belgium