October 2024: TAU student team won a gold medal 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 23-26, 2024 in Paris, and a team from TAU participated for the 6th time.  The TAU team, led by Prof. Tamir Tuller, Edmond J. Safra Center member (Engineering), included twelve students from the Faculties of Engineering, Life Sciences, Medicine, and Exact Sciences:  Gal Shwartz (co-captain), Shani Elimelech (co-captain), Daniel Benarroch, Itai Fabian, Jonathan Yoni Klein, Marana Abboud, Neve Tzvi, Netanel Erlich, Oren Ben Moshe, Peleg Bazak, Rotem Gal, and Tal Shemesh. 

The Steering Committee of the project included Profs. Avigdor Eldar (Edmond J. Safra affiliate), Uri Gophna and Martin Kupiec (Edmond J. Safra members), and Itai Benhar, all from the Life Sciences Faculty. The Steering Committee also included Mr. Yair Sakov, the managing director of the TAU innovation and entrepreneurship Center. The TAU team was partially supported by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Bioinformatics.

The project started in November 2023, with many of the students on the team being called to serve in reserve duty for a long period of time during this year. However, this did not prevent the students from winning the gold medal for their project "PROtech - Precise RNA oncotherapy".

Almost all targeted cancer therapies target amino acids changes in proteins. However, many cancer mutations are silent and thus do not change the amino acid content of the protein. Thus, such mutations are not usually targetable, leaving patients without any treatment.  To address this challenge, TAU iGEM team focused on developing an approach for targeting mRNA instead of proteins. The suggested technology was based on computational design of Toehold Switches. These Switches are designed to be selectively activated in the presence of cancer-specific mRNA, enabling precise production of (e.g. cytotoxic) proteins only in the cancer cells. The team developed a novel model to optimize toehold switch designs and validated it using yeast and human cell lines, focusing on pancreatic cancer. The team has also developed a user-friendly software that allows researchers exact design of Toehold Switch in prokaryotes and eukaryotes.

In addition, as part of the iGEM program, the students contributed substantially to education and outreach in the field of synthetic biology in Israel. Specifically, they were involved in the establishment of a synthetic biology major in the ORT high school network, which is expected to attract around 300 high school students this year. Furthermore, they organized, for the second time, a national competition for high school students in the field of synthetic biology, in which 100 high-school students participated. 

The team has submitted a patent application related to their novel technology and is currently working on a scientific paper about their novel discoveries.