Support is requested for a Keystone Symposia conference entitled Synthetic Biology: At the Crossroads of Genetic Engineering and Human Therapeutics, organized by Drs. Jose M. Lora and Timothy K. Lu. The conference will be held in Breckenridge, Colorado from March 29- April 1, 2019. 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.
Over the past two decades, tremendous advances have been made in the use of biological parts to engineer systems that can effectively direct living cells for a vast variety of purposes (a.k.a. synthetic biology). Synthetic biology is being used to construct more effective therapies in diseases such as cancer, but there are remaining obstacles to the clinical translation of these therapies. This Keystone Symposia conference will delve into the field of synthetic biology with a special emphasis on its applications to medicine.
