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Axial - Northwestern #1

Analysis of exciting Northwestern life sciences inventors and their inventions

Joshua Elkington
Aug 4, 2019
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In Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern has an exciting core of life sciences inventors that have the tools and discoveries to form unique companies.

Jewett Lab

Engineering biology for medicine, materials, and energy.

Recent

  • A leader in the field of synthetic biology whose work has supported companies such as Tierra and SwiftScale and more in the future - https://academic.oup.com/synbio/article/4/1/ysz003/5289333 - using a cell-free system to produce the fragrance/flavor, limonene at a mg scale.

  • Designing an in vitro ribosome system at a much lower cost, enabled by using a commonly used strain, and achieving a 10x fold increase in protein yield after the iterative design cycles - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssynbio.8b00276

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  • Inventing a cell-free glycoprotein synthesis tool (CFGpS) - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05110-x - to enable a one-pot reaction for site-specific asparagine-linked glycosylation; incredibly useful to antibody production:

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Past

  • Overview of ribosome engineering - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S136759311730008X - to design tethered ribosomes (Ribo-T) for production for new proteins:

  • Using a cell-free system of Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells to manufacture antibodies within 2 days (compared to 7 days) - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssynbio.7b00001 - with improvements required around improving specificity and scale of the experiment:

Bagheri Lab

Modeling dynamic biological systems.

Recent

  • The Bagheri Lab did a lot of important theoretical and computational work at Northwestern with the group moving to the University of Washington; modeling out the role of metabolism in the timing of fly development - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867419306865

Past

  • Overview of computational methods to explore biological networks - https://academic.oup.com/icb/article/54/2/296/639118

  • Framework to chose models for specific biological pathways and phenomena - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0958166916301100

Prindle Lab

Controlling microbial communities.

Recent

  • Studying biofilm systems and the heterogeneity in signaling within the community of microbes - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240547121830245X - important to understand how biofilms are formed and maintained to design interventions.

Past

  • Engineered a bacterium to lyse once it reaches a certain density within a microbial community and release its cargo - https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.northwestern.edu/dist/c/1892/files/2017/08/Din16-y3alq6.pdf - showing an ability to boost therapeutic efficacy of chemotherapies:

Rocklin Lab

High-throughput protein biophysics and design.

Past

  • Using protein design tools coupled with a high-throughput protease susceptibility assay measuring protein folding/stability, decoding 10Ks of de novo designed proteins - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5568797/

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  • Helping design new de novo conformationally-restricted peptides - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5161715/ - incredibly useful for stable peptide therapeutics.

  • With NGS and yeast display, testing ~20K de novo designed proteins - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5802399/ - showing use cases against influenza:

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Lamb Lab

Studying the structure and replication of viruses.

Past

  • Overview of the Paramyxoviridae virus class, an biquitous disease-causing virus in both humans and animals - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4424121/ - and their mechanisms to enter into host cells:

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  • Characterizing a new way on how the influenza A virus can spread between cells through intercellular connections - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4300760/

Mrksich Lab

Using organic chemistry to create new molecular tools.

Recent

  • Using self-assembled monolayers for matrix-assisted laser desorption-ionization (SAMDI) mass spectrometry to measure CoA-dependent pathways (important for metabolism) - https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/5/6/eaaw9180.full.pdf - to measure reaction conditions for each pathway relating on CoA:

  • Overview of the power of SAMDI mass spectrometry to measure reactions modifying peptides - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.biochem.9b00022

  • Inventing a microfluidic device to measure rate constants of a chemical reactions - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acscentsci.8b00867 - allowing a cheaper method to monitor reactions.

  • Developing a method to assess the structure–activity relationships (SAR) and design rules for spherical nucleic acids (SNA) - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-019-0351-1 - relying on mass spectrometry to measure SNA activity across ~1K candidates:

Past

  • Inventing a high-throughput method of SAMDI mass spectrometry to measure drug–drug interactions - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.analchem.6b01750 - valuable to measure adverse drug interactions before therapeutic approval.

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