Research Overview
We are a multidisciplinary group based in the Chemical Engineering Department at Imperial College London.
Our ambition is to usher in a new era of BioDesign, where synthetic cells can be engineered from the bottom up for bespoke applications: designer micromachines that can be used to deliver drugs, manufacture chemicals, generate their own energy, produce novel functional materials, and act as environmental sensors. This will allow us to not only mimic biology but also surpass it: incorporating wholly synthetic building blocks of the sort that biology cannot access, will give our engineered lifeforms new capabilities.
By blurring the boundaries between living and non-living matter, we use artificial cells as models to shed light on universal biological phenomena and micromachines that perform biotechnologically useful functions in industrial and clinical applications. This challenge requires us to develop new technologies, use new chemistry, and have a core molecular understanding of the systems we are working with. For this reason, we are a diverse bunch. Our team comprises of engineers, chemists, physicists, biologists, and biotechnologists. Our core research themes are given below.
Bottom-up Synthetic Biology
We design and build synthetic cells that possess behaviours that are the hallmarks of life: motility, energy generation, communication, replication, computation, protein production, self-repair, and evolution. We are seeking to exploit these behaviours in biomedical contexts (including synthetic cell therapies).
Biomimetic cell models
We use synthetic cells as models to answer fundamental questions of biological and biomedical relevance. What are the rules governing eukaryotic cell architectures? How do membrane properties affect cellular functions? What is the role of liquid-liquid phase separation in biology? How do drugs cross biological barriers to reach their target site? These are all open questions we are actively exploring. We are also developing our biomimetic models as tools that feed into drug/agrichem discovery pipelines.
Microfluidics and Optofluidics
We are constantly developing new state-of-the-art microfluidic technologies for synthetic biology applications, and to address challenges identified by our academic, industrial, and clinical collaborators. These include continuous flow and microdroplet technologies, microgel platforms, and optical trapping tools.
Soft matter particle engineering
We develop new platforms which enable precision engineering of nano/micro-scale soft particles with user-defined architectures. We can control the shape, molecular topology, number of compartments, lipid composition, membrane asymmetry, phase, compartment connectivity, and encapsulated cargo of the particles. We are particularly interested in designing novel stimuli-responsive membranes that can be activated in response to various intrinsic/extrinsic cues (temperature, light, magnetic fields, acoustic waves, pH, hypoxia). We are applying these particles in drug delivery, vaccines, synthetic biology, and biosensing applications.
Cellular Bionics
We are interested in fusing engineered (inanimate) biochemical microsystems with biological cells to yield living/synthetic composite systems. We embed living cells in synthetic ones, engineer them to act as organelles within the hybrid entity, and create populations of interacting living and synthetic cells. A summary of this strand of the group’s research is shown in the video below.
Our Research Community
Being a multidisciplinary research group, collaborations are central to what we do. We have active projects with academics from a host of departments at Imperial College and beyond, including Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Medicine, Bioengineering, Public Health and Life Sciences. Our group is an integral part of the Membrane Biophysics Platform, and is affiliated with several large-scale centres at Imperial which align with our research ambitions, including:
Our Funders
We thank our funders for their generous support. Our current funders are the UKRI through a Future Leaders Fellowship and the EPSRC, BBSRC, NSF, The Royal Society, Leverhulme Trust, and Royal Society of Chemistry. We also thank our industrial sponsors: GSK Vaccines, AstraZeneca and Syngenta.
