The Mission

Every year, a multidisciplinary student team from the TU/e participates in the iGEM Competition. The Eindhoven team focuses on the application of synthetic biology for medical problems, by engineering genetically modified organisms. We want to use our knowledge to improve healthcare and push the boundaries of what we can do with bacteria!

The Challenge 

1 in 4 persons face some form of bowel disease at some point in their life. These can range from food intolerances, to inflammatory diseases and cancer. The treatment of many of these diseases is too invasive, too expensive, or simply does not work well enough to treat the patient. This is why we are making a platform with bacteria that we can use for many bowel diseases. We mainly want to focus IBD and colorectal cancer to start with, because these diseases have 4.9 milion and 1.9 milion cases worldwide. Both of these diseases have expensive, invasive and non-specific treatments that cause many side effects. So there is a need for new, revolutionized therapies.

The Solution

Imagine you can take pill or yoghurt drink with bacteria that treats a specific bowel disease. We achieve this by forming a hydrogel inside bacteria, causing them to not divide anymore at body temperature. However, they will still divide at room temperature so they can be cultured outside the body. At the same time, the bacteria will produce therapeutics. This creates a modular platform to cure a variety of intestinal diseases in a non-invasive way.

This project is being coached by