Difference between revisions of "Team:CU-Boulder/Human Practices"

We very much wanted to continue off the work we had laid out at iGEM last year, using our mutant and photo-openable EutS compartments. However, last year’s iGEM team did not really focus on what you could use our compartments for. This year, we started out early by asking ourselves what human problem we could solve using nano-scale isolation and sequestration that could open on demand.

Small molecule drug delivery remains the biggest field in the pharmaceutical industry today. Every year, billions of these drugs are synthesized and consumed by humans in almost every corner of the world, for far ranging purposes. But there are problems with small molecule delivery: non-specificity of interactions and the relatively high concentrations you sometimes need to use to generate the effects are a major cause of “side effects” in pharmaceuticals. We wondered if this was a problem we could solve if we used our nanocompartments to deliver drugs to only their intended receptors, opening there on demand. This would cut down on widespread side effects throughout the body.

While we understood that this was by no means a perfect solution to this problem, as cost, storage, and administration could prove effective barriers, it could also allow for new small molecule treatments for conditions that might have never worked otherwise, and so we decided to forge ahead with this idea in mind.

To that end, we developed our Luciferase and TNF-alpha fusion cargo proteins, and assays which could test our EutS derived compartments as a means of treating cells or binding other ligands. While we still aren’t sure that would be usable or practical in its current state, it would nevertheless serve as a proof of concept that could be iterated on for years to come, potentially revolutionizing small molecule development with new approaches never before possible.