Control Engineering is a scientific discipline devoted to engineer complex systems and make sure they behave reliably and robustly. For example, airplanes and self-driving cars are equipped with “controllers” that make sure they track the the correct route at the correct speed, in spite of external disturbances such as wind, rain, traffic, etc. The basic idea driving the COSY-BIO project is to translate Control Engineering principles to living cells to engineer molecular circuits endowing cells with new functions with applications to biotechnology and biomedicine. Attempts to apply engineering principles to biological processes to understand and build new functions in cells have led to the growing research interdisciplinary community of Synthetic Biology. However, application and adaption of established theories and techniques from conventional control engineering have been hampered by the peculiarities of biological systems.
COSYBIO research has considerably advanced the state of the art both at the theoretical/methodological level in designing biocontrollers and in their experimental implemenation.
At the methodological level, we have found a set of guiding principles that allow us to design external, embedded and multicellular biological controllers that work reliably and robustly in the cell. At the experimental level, we have implemented external, embedded and multicellular controllers in bacteria and yeast, thus experimentally validating the theoretical and methodological results we obtained. We also developed technologies and software to help advance and streamline biocontrol engineering, by building an automated platform able to autonomously perform experiments in bacterial and yeast cells and to build a mathematical model of the biological process of interest, based on the experiment results. We also developed open-source software tools to ease image analysis, automated microscopy and model building.
The benefits to society of the technology developed in COSYBIO are many: in the short-term biocontrol engineering can make an impact in biotechnology where engineered microbial cells are used to convert biomass and other feedstock into desired products such as fuels, food and antibiotics. These processes can be made much more efficient and environmentally sustainable by engineering external, embedded or multicellular controllers that ensure the cells behave as desired in the bioreactors to maximise production. In the long-term, we foresee a major impact in biomedicine where biocontrol engineering will lead to major inroads into bacterial and human cell engineering for therapeutic purposes and regenerative medicine (e.g. bacteria able to deliver a therapeutic payload to cancer cells, or metabolise toxic products to treat metabolic disease; or engineered human T cells to fight cancer).
