October 2022: Gold medal to TAU team in iGEM

A TAU team of students won a gold medal, the best model award, and nominated for best software award in the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition.
 

 
iGEM is a worldwide synthetic biology competition, in which hundreds of groups from universities around the world participate every year and present novel ideas that address current global issues. This year, the iGEM annual contest took place on October 26-28, 2022, in Paris, and a team from TAU participated for the 4rh time.  The TAU team, led by Prof. Tamir Tuller, Edmond J. Safra Center member (Engineering), included fifteen students from the Faculties of Engineering, Life Sciences, and Exact Sciences:  Efi Moree (captain), Tal Tzfoni, Rei Mendel, Nitay Ad-El, Roee Ovadia, Yulie Hagani, Yoav Navon, Kobi Mashiach, Ilan Edelstein, Yehuda Landau, and Dor Breier.

 
The TAU team, which was partially supported by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Bioinformatics, developed an innovative technology for designing mRNA molecules that are selectively translated only in target cells.  

mRNAs (messenger RNAs) serve as an intermediate step between DNA and proteins. The potential of mRNA-based technologies has attracted much attention recently, owing to mRNA-based corona vaccines, prompting researchers to use mRNA to solve additional and more complex problems. For example, designing an mRNA molecule encoding a toxin that is only expressed in cancer cells, could kill such cells without harming healthy cells. This was the challenge the TAU team set out to address, developing a computational engine that facilitates automatic design of selectively-expressed mRNA molecules. To this end, the team developed a series of computational models to describe mRNA-related physical processes, including self-folding and interaction with other molecules. The team then verified the capabilities of their application across several organisms, demonstrating improvement over recently published state-of-the-art, as well as, for the first time, the ability to activate an mRNA molecule by another mRNA in a eukaryotic cell. 

The team has submitted a patent application related to this novel technology and plans to continue working on the project, potentially in collaboration with biotech companies such as Lonza which has sponsored this project.

The team also won the outstanding poster award at the first Israeli synthetic biology conference. 

The TAU iGEM achievements are featured in the online newspapers YNET.