ix U of T Engineering researchers, including Professor Krishna Mahadevan (ChemE), are among nine teams awarded $1.2 million in funding from Medicine by Design to support critical new ideas in regenerative medicine.
Medicine by Design’s New Ideas and Seed Fund awards supports translational research aimed at advancing innovative concepts that are expected to be of critical importance to regenerative medicine in the coming decades, using tools such as synthetic biology and mathematical modelling.
Medicine by Design is a research initiative at U of T with a mandate to accelerate transformational discoveries and translate them into new therapies for common diseases.
“With these awards, we are pushing the frontiers of regenerative medicine by encouraging creativity, risk-taking and excellence at the convergence of science, engineering and medicine,” said Professor Michael Sefton (IBBME, ChemE), executive director of Medicine by Design. “These projects exemplify the best of Medicine by Design by bringing people together across disciplines and institutions to tackle novel questions and test new approaches.”
Professor Mahadevan’s team has received a 2019 Medicine by Design New Ideas Award for their work which aims to create new therapies for inflammatory bowel disease such as Crohn’s disease by engineering gut bacteria that can sense inflammation, and then secrete molecules that dampen it and promote regeneration of the intestinal lining. Combining synthetic biology and stem cell biology, the project also draws on the expertise of co-investigators Keith Pardee at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and Tae-Hee Kim at the department of molecular genetics.
To learn more about Medicine by Design’s New Ideas and Seed Fun awards click HERE.
