13TSB_SynBio:Enhanced discovery and scalable synthesis of therapeutic cyclic peptides

天然产品往往具有非常理想的生物和材料特性。在未来，将会有巨大的压力来生产经济上有价值的材料，同时大大减少对环境的影响。这意味着英国的工业生物技术部门(与制药业相关，但有别于制药业)拥有利用世界级科学的黄金机会。这项提议将一流的学术科学与一家创新的小公司Ingenza提供的独特专业知识联系起来。该项目的主要目标是开发一种细菌系统(细胞工厂)，用于大量生产新的可定制和高度修饰的环肽。环肽作为抗生素、抗癌剂、激素治疗和免疫系统调节剂被发现。除了它们的直接药用作用外，它们在研究生物过程中也是非常有用的工具，作为工具的第二种作用还没有得到充分的发展，仅仅是因为天然产品很难制造出足够的数量。这项拟议的工作将通过提供一种即插即用的系统来解决这些问题，在该系统中，可以简单而快速地对“细胞工厂”进行改变，以生产大量有用规模的环肽。

Natural products often have very desirable biological and material properties. In the future there will be immense pressure to produce economically valuable materials with much reduced environmental impact. This means the Industrial Biotechnology sector (which is related to, but distinct from the Pharmaceutical Industry) in the UK has a golden opportunity to harness world class science. This proposal links first class academic science with unique expertise available in an innovative small company, Ingenza. The main aim of the project is to develop a bacterial system (cell factory) for the production of novel customizable and highly modified cyclic peptides in significant quantities. Cyclic peptides are found as antibiotics, anticancer agents, in hormone therapy and in immune system modifying agents. In addition to their direct medicinal role, they are also very useful tools in studying biological processes, this second role, as tools, is underdeveloped simply because natural products are hard to make in sufficient amounts. The proposed work will solve these problems by providing a plug 'n' play system in which changes can be made simply and quickly to the 'cell factory' to produce a vast array of cyclic peptides at a useful scale.