Engineering Biology Collaborative R&D: Round 3
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 to £2.5 million, last 12 to 36 months and begin no earlier than 1 April 2027. The open competition closes on 3 November 2026 at 11:00am UK time.
Rett syndrome, MECP2 and therapeutic strategies
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 chromosome. (ii) MECP2 is thought to act as repressor of gene expression. I will present data which show that MECP2 binds to Pol II and acts as an activator for thousands of genes. The target genes are significantly enriched for Autism related genes. Our data challenge the established model of MECP2’s role in gene expression and suggest novel therapeutic approaches.