Five TU Delft students took top honours at the internationally Genetically Engineered Machine Foundation (iGEM) Europe Jamboree in October.
Their gold medal-winning Peptidor project aims to offer new treatment for MRSA, an antibiotic-resistant staphylococcus infection. The team included Joep Kooijman, Maithili Krishnan, Bharath Kumar, Derk Te Winkel, Dimitra Zafeiro- poulou. Esengül Yildirim, Calin Plesa, and Assistant Professors Timon Idema and Anne Meyer supervised.
According to Meyer, the group successfully engineered a new function in E. coli bacteria that successfully finds and kills MRSA. When near the staphylococcus, the iGEM team’s E. coli makes a large store of peptides (short proteins made up of fewer amino acids than normal proteins), which then attack MRSA in the human body, destroying the home base E. coli in the process. “Then you don’t have to worry about modified organisms lingering in the environment”, Meyer explained. The E. coli “has a lot of potential to be used as a therapy for humans”, she added, saying that one possibility could be encapsulating it in an adhesive bandage.
The main barrier to developing this application is the anti-GMO political climate, according to Meyer. The group’s October gold win qualified them to travel to the iGEM World Championship in November. Although they didn’t win any prizes there, Meyer emphasizes that this is a special group. “I was really impressed with them,” she said, as a very independent, organized and creative team that really stepped up to the task of envisioning and carrying out an award-winning project in a very short amount of time.
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