As part of an international competition in the field of synthetic biology, the student team carried out innovative research aimed at developing a treatment for cancer patients who until now were incurable, thus adding a new "dimension" to the world of cancer treatments
An impressive achievement for the student team of Tel Aviv University (IGEM): As part of an international competition in the field of synthetic biology, the student team carried out innovative research aimed at developing a treatment for cancer patients who until now were incurable, thereby adding a new "dimension" to the world of cancer treatments. The research won a gold medal in a recent competition held in Paris and a patent was filed on the subject.
iGEM is a global competition in the field of synthetic biology in which each team conceives an innovative idea that aims to solve some problem in the field of synthetic biology and realizes it in practice by using engineering, biological and computational tools in a manner similar to the development of the startup company. The jury is usually composed of researchers and scientists with experience in the field, some of whom participated in the competition in the past, or guided teams in the competition. This year over 400 teams from all over the world competed in the competition.
The iGEM team of Tel Aviv University consists, as every year, of outstanding students coming from different academic backgrounds (engineering, life sciences, medicine, exact sciences), who were given the opportunity to work together to conduct research in the field of synthetic biology.
The team's academic guide, Prof. Tamir Toler from the Faculty of Engineering explains: "This year was particularly challenging because we started in November despite the postponement of the academic academic year to January. A large part of the team served in the reserves and there was high uncertainty regarding our ability to complete the task at the appointed time."
The development of the team presented in the competition included an innovative method called Precise RNA Oncotherapy (PROtech) that will allow to design personalized engineered treatments for cancer patients who are currently incurable. The goal of the project is to allow tailored and personally engineered treatment even for patients whose cancer cell mutations did not change the structure of the proteins in the cell. Since the treatments today are based on the identification of cancer cells based on proteins that have changed in them, this is a revolutionary direction with a lot of potential. The development is based, among other things, on innovative computational models with improved performance relative to previous articles from the research front, so the members of the team are working on an innovative article in the field.
Alongside the work on the project, the group emphasized promoting and making the field of synthetic biology accessible to high school students in Israel, and therefore held a national competition in synthetic biology for high school students and took part in establishing a synthetic biology course in the Ort high school network with the goal of training hundreds of high school students in the coming year.
Prof. Toler: "Fortunately, the team's development is already arousing great interest among biotech/pharma companies, and a patent application was even submitted with the help of Ramot (Tel Aviv University's commercialization company). There is no doubt that, especially in these difficult times, the students have brought a lot of respect to Tel Aviv University and the State of Israel, but along with winning the medal, they also made a very important academic journey and in the framework of the competition acquired tools that will help them further in their careers as graduates in academia and industry. And in society. Finally, I would like to thank the Startup Nation Central organization and the entrepreneurship center at Tel Aviv University for the high-quality training they provided to the entrepreneurship students."
Members of the IGEM team of Tel Aviv University: Shani Elimelech (Faculty of Engineering and Faculty of Life Sciences), Gal Schwartz (Faculty of Life Sciences), Daniel Ben Hash (Faculty of Engineering), Ratem Gal (Faculty of Engineering and Faculty of Life Sciences), Oren Ben Moshe (Faculty of Sciences) Exact), Nathaniel Ehrlich (Faculty of Exact Sciences and Faculty of Life Sciences), Peleg Bezek (Faculty of Engineering and Faculty of Life Sciences), Tal Shemesh (Faculty of Engineering and Faculty of Life Sciences), Nev Tzvi (Faculty of Medicine), Yoni Klein (Faculty of Life Sciences), Itai Fabian (Faculty of Medicine), Marana Abood (Faculty of Medicine).
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