Imperial College London students win a clutch of prizes at the 2009 International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM)

By Danielle Reeves
Friday 6 November 2009

A project to develop a self-manufacturing pill which can produce a drug inside itself and then automatically encapsulate the drug into a neutral delivery system won a team of Imperial College London students a clutch of prizes at the 2009 International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition at MIT this week.

The team comprised eight students from the Departments of Bioengineering and Life Sciences. The team won two major prizes in the competition: for the second year running Imperial College won the prize for the best manufacturing project; the prize for the best consideration of ethical issues in relation to device design; and a gold medal. There were 120 competing teams from top universities worldwide in this year’s competition – the Imperial team came fourth overall.

The iGEM competition is an international celebration of students' achievements in synthetic biology, an emerging field in which engineers work with molecular bioscientists to produce biologically-based engineering parts, by modifying bacterial DNA.

The Imperial student team worked for four months to design and create ‘The Encapsulator’ – a self-manufacturing pill that began life as a simple bacterial cell. The team genetically altered the cell so it could manufacture a drug - such as an enzyme or protein needed to treat a disease - inside itself, on command. Uniquely, the team also manipulated the cell so that once the drug had been produced, the cell grew an acid-resistant shell that will enable the drug inside to be safely delivered past the stomach to the human intestine. The students also encoded a control mechanism for the ‘encapsulation’ process, which was triggered automatically by genetic switches. .  The students’ aim was to show that bacterial cells could be used as flexible, multi-purpose ‘drug factories’, which could be induced to produce different drugs on demand.

An EM image from the students’ lab shows the engineered bacterium encapsulated by a thick layer of colanic acid

They also used modelling techniques to show it would be possible to induce the bacterial cell to delete its own genome, effectively killing itself, once the drug has been made and the encapsulation process completed. This would render it completely inanimate, and therefore more palatable as a drug for human consumption.

Professor Richard Kitney from Imperial’s Department of Bioengineering, who co-led Imperial’s students along with Professor Paul Freemont and Dr Geoff Baldwin from the Department of Life Sciences, congratulated the team, saying: “They did an absolutely brilliant job with a technically challenging project. The idea of having an all-in-one bacterial drug production and pill-like delivery unit is revolutionary. It could offer a low-cost, simple and efficient way of producing drugs that can be safely delivered to the human intestine. That’s why iGEM is such a fantastic competition – it gives undergraduates a unique chance to get their teeth into a ground-breaking research project, and explore ideas that could change the world.”

The Imperial students and academic supervisors celebrate their awards at the iGEM jamboree

Producing drugs using biological methods is becoming an increasingly important part of drug development. However, oral delivery of such drugs remains a challenge as they tend to be degraded in the acidic environment of the stomach. The Encapsulator provides the ability to deliver proteins and peptides, in a functional form, safely through the stomach, to the intestine.

Professors Kitney and Freemont, who co-direct the College’s Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation, say the students’ work will now be developed in their lab, with particular focus on research to develop the synthetic biology device into a more general delivery system where drugs need to bypass the stomach.

This is the sixth year that the international iGEM competition has been run by MIT, and the fourth year Professors Kitney and Freemont and have taken an Imperial team to the finals.