Team:Slovenia

Biological drugs such as hormones, enzymes, cytokines or antibodies are increasingly used to treat different diseases. Due to systemic administration, these drugs often have adverse effects. Additionally, the high cost of biopharmaceuticals imposes a heavy burden on health systems.

We aimed to use the principles of synthetic biology to develop a safe and cost-effective method of in situ production of biological drugs to increase the quality of patients' lives. This system should increase compliance to therapy, minimize the number of required invasive procedures and enable advanced multistage therapy while local administration could reduce the side effects.

We addressed this challenge by implementing microencapsulated engineered mammalian cells that can be regulated from the outside to produce different therapeutics. This system should be reliable, cost effective and safe.

Biological drugs have lately been replacing chemical drugs in the treatement of numerous diseases due to their more specific nature. The current route of biological drug administration is usually systemic, which means that the drug is distributed more or less throughout the whole body, although its function should often be restricted to a specific organ or tissue. This can cause serious side effects, requires larger dosages and consequently raises the price of therapy. Our solution to this problem is to implant cells producing biological drugs inside the very tissue where the drug is required. The drug producing cells are safely sealed inside microcapsules, that prevent them from spreading throughout the body and protect them from destruction by cells of the host immune system. We invented a device that allows implanted cells to produce different types of drugs and switching between them can be controlled by a physician depending on the stage of the disease. We designed cells for use in the therapy of hepatitis C, where the engineered cells produce a biological drug that has antiviral activity followed by a drug that improves liver regeneration. For the therapy after a heart attack we designed cells to suppress inflammation and promote formation of new blood vessels around the affected tissue. A physician may initiate self-destruction of the therapeutic cells and capsules by an outside stimulus when the therapy is complete or at any other given time. We believe our system to be safe and effective and applicable to the therapy of different types of diseases.