Medical products
Synthetic biology is opening new opportunities to live a healthy life, with new manufacturing processes for producing vaccines and medicine, and advances in regenerative medicine.
Advances in medical research
Synthetic biology is a tool that can be used in a variety of ways. For example, The Fischer Lab at the ANU John Curtin School for Medical Research is pursuing synthetic biology approaches to develop early detection and novel treatment methods in cancer. The team is generating a molecular tool that can distinguish between cancer cells and non-cancer cells by detecting specific mutations in the genome, and eliminating cancer cells very specifically, without the strong side-effects of current cancer treatments.
Manufacturing vaccines
ANU is collaborating with Canadian biopharmaceutical company Medicago R&D Inc to optimise the way vaccines are produced in plants. Medicago R&D Inc uses a proprietary plant-based technology to develop vaccines and protein-based therapeutics. Key to their technology is the production of Virus-Like Particles (VLPs) as vaccines. VLPs mimic the structure of viruses and can induce an immune response without causing an infection. When purified, VLPs have the potential to be used as vaccines against a range of viruses, such as influenza, rotavirus, and norovirus.
The ANU Centre of Entrepreneurial Agri-Technology have brougtht together a team of plant scientists and computer scientists to develop new methods and tools to monitor the growth and performance of plants. This project is supported by infrastructure at the ANU Node of the Australian Plant Phenomics Facility (APPF), funded through NCRIS.