April 2025: Edmond J. Safra Center supports TAU iGEM team

A multidisciplinary team of students from Tel Aviv University, led by Prof. Tamir Tuller, a member of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Bioinformatics (Engineering), is participating in the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) 2025 competition, marking the university’s seventh entry into this prestigious global event.

The iGEM competition is the world’s largest synthetic biology competition, bringing together hundreds of teams from across the globe. Each team is challenged to develop innovative, biology-based solutions to real-world problems, pushing the boundaries of science, engineering, and biotechnology.

Currently, most cancer mutations are not druggable and thus, there are no specific therapies for treating most cancer patients. The aim of TAU’s iGEM team is to develop a novel approach for treating many of the undruggable cases. Their approach is based on the development of a novel pipeline for designing Oligonucleotides (ASOs).

ASOs are short, single-stranded nucleic acids engineered to bind to target mRNA sequences, blocking their translation and promoting gene silencing. The iGEM TAU 2025 novel platform is tailored to design ASOs for silencing specific cancer-driving genes in individual patients with high specificity and minimal off-target effects. Their strategy is multidisciplinary in nature and combines tools from bioinformatics, molecular biology, engineering, statistics, machine learning, and medicine.

The Edmond J. Safra Center is one of the iGEM TAU team's supporters.