This business-led collaborative research and development competition will fund new engineering-biology products, processes and services and de-risk technologies with strong market potential. Projects may address health, agriculture and food, chemicals and materials, low-carbon fuels, waste and environment, or cross-cutting technology and service development. The central innovation must purposefully engineer biological systems and may involve biosensors, biomanufacturing, synthetic-biology platforms, gene editing, AI or computational biology. Projects must have total eligible costs of £750,000
357 | Jeff Coller on mRNA, Vaccines, and Bespoke Therapeutics
Sean Carroll's Mindscape
Jun 15, 2026
Jeff Coller explains how messenger RNA carries information from DNA to the machinery that produces proteins and how researchers are learning to use it therapeutically. The conversation covers vaccination, tailored treatments and approaches connected with gene editing, placing these developments in the broader biology of RNA and its possible role in the origins of life.
Jennifer Doudna discusses how CRISPR changed gene editing and what might come next. The conversation examines emerging applications, technical limitations and the ethical choices involved in altering genetic material, including how scientific progress can be paired with responsible use.
Rett syndrome, MECP2 and therapeutic strategies
Rudolf Jaenisch · Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and Department of Biology, MIT, Cambridge, USA
Wed, Dec 11, 2024 · 12:15 UTC
The development of the iPS cell technology has revolutionized our ability to study development and diseases in defined in vitro cell culture systems. The talk will focus on Rett Syndrome and discuss two topics: (i) the use of gene editing as an approach to therapy and (ii) the role of MECP2 in gene expression (i) The mutation of the X-linked MECP2 gene is causative for the disease. In a female patient, every cell has a wt copy that is, however, in 50% of the cells located on the inactive X chromosome. We have used epigenetic gene editing tools to activate the wt MECP2 allele on the inactive X