Background
Gut Inflammation
Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) is a kind of autoimmune disease and mainly divided into two types—Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC). Crohn’s disease can affect any part of gastrointestinal tract, especially in terminal ileum, while Ulcerative colitis only happen in colon and rectum. However, both CD and UC could cause extra-intestinal manifestations such as eye problem and arthritis. Furthermore, the treatment of CD and UC are different—Mesalazine is much more useful for UC while it is better to have an Antibotics for treating Crohn’s disease. Incidence of IBD increased in the last few years and affect a large number of people around the world—over 4 million people in Europe as well as Unite State. Among all the patients, there is a relatively high increasing incidence in children and teenagers. Additionally, IBD is more likely happened in industrializing country like India and China. A survey conducted by Ray, G shows that IBD is an emerging problem in India and also indicate ulcerative colitis is increasingly severe and widespread in recent times.
Noninvasive Treatment with Engineered Bacteria
Nowadays, medicines are transforming from micromolecules to more complex molecules even biological medicines. The reasons of this transforming are that the more complex medicines can make the treatment more targeting, less side-effect and these complex medicines such as some engineering bacteria can have more room for improvement.
These complex medicines can also treat for a wide range like cancer, inflammation, disease of immune system, so these medicines are capable to make lots of profits. However, there are a number of difficulties for biological medicines. These medicines not only have pretty high prices but also are hard to mass produce. What’s more, some of these medicines cannot store for a long time. Therefore, there is high risk of investment on this industry.
Certainly, there are some solutions for these disadvantages such as increasing productions yields in bioreactors using microorganisms, reducing the time and cost associated with the slow growth of mammalian cells, and assisting on the optimization and engineering of biologics thanks to the high cloning capacity of microorganisms and the efficient screening methods of microbial libraries. So base on these solutions, biological engineering has made great progress.
Inflamation Sensor
Our sensor systems’ gene were obtained from S. typhimuriumspecies and then transformed into E.coli strain. We’ve built two sensor systems, one sensing thiosulfate and the other sensing tetrathionate, linking them to three different reporters: the GFP protein, the chromo-protein, and the violacein.The two systems are composed as the following:
ThsSR system: pSB4K5-thsS+pSB1C3-thsR-sfGFP/BBa_K1033919/BBa_K1033932/BBa_K592009/ (violacein)
TtrSR system: pSB4K5-ttrS+pSB1C3-ttrR-sfGFP/BBa_K1033919/BBa_ K1033932/BBa_K592009/ (violacein)
Citation
Beatriz, A., Luis, A.F., Sustainable therapies by engineered bacteria (2017). microbial biotechnology, DOI: 10.1111/1751-7915.12778
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