Team:Imperial College London

For iGEM 2009 the Imperial College London team present you with The E.ncapsulator; a versatile manufacturing and delivery platform by which therapeutics can be reliably targeted to the intestine.

Our E.coli chassis progresses through a series of defined stages culminating in the production of a safe, inanimate pill. This sequential process involves drug production, protective encapsulation and genome deletion. The temporal transition between each of these stages is controlled by physical and chemical methods, showing that we have taken an engineering approach to tackle this problem.

The E.ncapsulator provides an innovative method to deliver any biologically synthesisable compound and bypasses the need for expensive storage, packaging and purification processes. The E.ncapsulator is an attractive candidate for commercial pill development and demonstrates the massive manufacturing potential in Synthetic Biology.