13 décembre 2018: Prof. Luis Serrano
La conférence est annulée - Conference cancelled
Jeudi 13 décembre 2018
12h30, CMU - Auditoire A. Franceschetti (C150)
Prof. Luis Serrano
Director, Centre for Genomic Regulation - CRG, Barcelona
ICREA Research Professor - EMBO member
«Engineering a small bacterium to treat human lung diseases»
Using live bacteria to treat human diseases is not a taboo anymore. The past few years have seen the publication of articles describing the use of modified bacteria to treat cancer, gut disbiosis, metabolic diseases, etc, as well as numerous start-up companies popping up in these fields. Here I will explain a project in my lab aimed at using a human lung pathogen that causes mild pneumonia to treat human lung infectious diseases. I will first detail the exhaustive systems analysis carried out to try to understand its transcriptome, proteome and metabolome. Then I will describe the development of the tools necessary to engineer it, leading to the design and creation of a chassis organism, which according to preliminary data can survive in mouse lung and dissolve S. aureus biofilms in catheters in vivo. I will finish with a general discussion about the challenges of engineering live bacteria for the treatment of human diseases.
Biography
Luis Serrano did his PhD at the CBM (Madrid, Spain) on Cell Biology. Then he spent 4 years in the laboratory of Prof. A.R. Fehrs (MRC, UK) working in protein folding. In 1993, he became Group Leader at the EMBL (Heidelberg, Germany) working in Protein Folding and design. Ten years later, he was appointed head of the Structural & Computational Biology programme at the EMBL and he started to work on Systems Biology. By the end of 2006 he moved back to Spain to lead a programme working on Systems Biology, where he was appointed vice-director before finally becoming the CRG director on July 2011. He is a member of the Spanish Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (SEBBM), member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), and member of the Royal Spanish Academy of Sciences (Spain). In 2003 he received the Marie Curie Excellence Award, in 2009 he was awarded the City of Barcelona prize (science category), an annual award organized by Barcelona City Council and in 2018 the Francisco Cobos award (http://fundacionfranciscocobos.org/).. He has won four prestigious grants from the European Research Council, two ERC Advanced Grants and two ERC Proof of Concept grants. He is Professor of ICREA, has directed 18 PhD thesis and published more than 350 papers in international journals. He was involved in the creation of one of the first Spanish Biotech Companies (Diverdrugs) in 1999. He is co-founder of Cellzome, EnVivo and TRISKEL. He has been Director and Founder of the association of European Institutes of Excellence EU-LIFE, and founder of a similar organization, SOMMA, in Spain.