Cell-Free Protein Expression to Better Distribute Medicine

Our Team project this year is focusing on the characterization and development of cell-free systems for protein expression in the hopes of increasing the ability of these systems to produce medicinal biologics for areas without advanced medical infrastructure.

Our team this year became interested in diseases that were treatable but undertreated, especially in the healthcare space of diseases that had effective treatments but where access to these treatments was the limiting factor leading to unnecessary suffering. Specifically our group became drawn to sub-Saharan Africa where infectious diseases cause roughly a third of all deaths [1]. Many of these diseases are treatable but access to the treatment is limited. One key limiting factor is the availability of cold-chain distribution. Many medicinal biologics like vaccines and recombinant proteins are rapidly denatured and destroyed when not refrigerated and in order for them to maintain medical usability they need to be manufactured, shipped, and stored at cool temperatures. In areas without consistent electricity or reliable roads for refrigerated transport this is prohibitively difficult.

One potential way of circumventing the cold chain is to use freeze-dried cell-free systems to produce medicinal biologics at the point of care.

These systems are shelf-stable at room temperature and are economically viable [2]. Our project will use a variety of anti-microbial peptides of varying complexity in order to demonstrate the capabilities and limitations of our system in producing proteins of measurable medical impact. We hope to elucidate the various limiting factors of cell-free expression (protein size, secondary structure complexity, and post translational modification) and to improve the capability of cell-free expression to produce biologics of greater complexity and medical relevance.

Advice on writing your Project Description

We encourage you to put up a lot of information and content on your wiki, but we also encourage you to include summaries as much as possible. If you think of the sections in your project description as the sections in a publication, you should try to be consist, accurate and unambiguous in your achievements.

Judges like to read your wiki and know exactly what you have achieved. This is how you should think about these sections; from the point of view of the judge evaluating you at the end of the year.