Keystone Symposium 2021
Anti-arrhythmic ion channel engineering enables self-restoration of cardiac rhythm: towards synthetic biomedicine in cardiologyÂ
The conference:
Synthetic Biology tools and principles have matured tremendously over the last decade and have reached extraordinary levels of sophistication, both in eukaryotic and prokaryotic systems. Synthetic biology as a therapeutic modality is starting to enter multiple clinical studies and has the potential to have a significant impact on medicine across a wide range of diseases (e.g., metabolic, immune-mediated, cancer, and neurologic diseases). This Keystone Symposia conference will delve into the field of synthetic biology with a special emphasis on its applications to medicine. While there are conferences that capture synthetic biology in only a few talks mixed in among other various topics, there is a paucity of conferences focused on synthetic biology as drugs to treat disease.
However, due to the rapid pace of fundamental scientific advances along with an expanding number of biotechnology companies and emerging clinical studies with synthetic biology at their core, this conference will be highly relevant for a wide audience of scientists both from academia and industry. In addition, other meetings in this field have a highly technology-driven focus on synthetic biology techniques with relatively little attention given to biological and medical context. Ultimately, this Keystone Symposia conference should inspire researchers from diverse backgrounds to discuss synthetic biology via many new angles.
The keystone symposium featured a variety of posters, and invited researchers to submit abstracts for presentation. I was selected and given the honor of presenting my research about a fully biological defibrillator in front of a multi-disciplinary audience.
My short talk:
Background
The research that was presented, is a result of a multi-year process where I was not the only investigator. I should express my thanks to Rupamanjari Majumder and Nina Kudryashova for carrying out this research together with me, and Daniel Pijnappels for the idea behind it. All together we realized mathematical, computational and biological studies that resulted in our BioICD publication.
Impact
This project showed that synthetic biology can become a tool for novel ways of thinking about arrhythmia termination. By engineering new functionality into the heart, it might become possible to make the heart a self-regulatory organ. By presenting this work at the Keystone Symposium conference, this idea might be stretched towards other disciplines or inspire other cardiac researchers to embrace the techniques and possibilities of synthetic biology.