Tuesday July 7, 2026
1:30 pm
DC 1302
"Engineering microbial cells for application as live cell therapeutics"
The ominous rise in the frequency of antibiotic resistant microbial infections poses a global threat to human health. This threat comes in the direct form of disease related to infection of humans but also indirectly in the form of challenges to food security through loss of agricultural crops and animals to disease. The development of antibiotic drugs in previous decades was transformational, providing cheap, effective treatment for what would otherwise would be a lethal infection. As microbial strains resistant to our front-line antibiotic drugs have emerged, there is an urgent need to develop new therapeutic strategies and tools. Synthetic biology and metabolic engineering can be applied to generate "weaponized" live cell therapeutics providing new means to combat the rapidly evolving threat of microbial pathogens. In this presentation, I will highlight progress from my laboratory in engineering probiotic microbial cells that have been endowed with functionalities derived from bacteriophages and synthetic nanobodies allowing them to inhibit microbial toxins, kill microbial pathogens and deliver therapeutic molecules. The potential benefits of engineered probiotics are highlighted along with the challenges that must still be met before these intriguing new therapeutic tools can be widely deployed.
