28.06.2021 | Published by Bioinformatics 

Founder and CEO Dr Mark Kotter talks reprogrammed human cells for research and drug development

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 On Tuesday 22 June 2021, bit.bio Founder and CEO Dr Mark Kotter was a speaker on the Bioinformatics CRO Podcast with Dr Grant Belgard. In the podcast they discuss the beginnings of synthetic biology going back to the late 80s, and how exciting it is today to apply all this knowledge. And how that’s being done specifically at bit.bio to create a technology that allows very precise control of transcription factors. This can open up many things that scientists have been dreaming of - cells to understand, human biology, cells that allow you to better study human diseases and create better drugs, or make it easier for drugs to be developed and be successful.
 
 

 

“For us, the DNA in the nucleus of a cell is a bit like the hard drive, so all the information is stored, it's actually read-only memory. And then, within a cell, only part of the operating system, part of these programmes that are stored on the DNA level are actually active. This is structured in what's called gene regulatory networks. And these are the sub-programmes in the cell. So genes that control these programmes are called transcription factors. What we do is we activate these transcription factors to instruct the cells and obtain certain functions. And what you can do is you can take this approach, and you can literally program a stem cell to become the cell type that you're interested in. And this is 10 times faster, we can do it with extreme precision. And it's very, very scalable"

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Mark KotterCo-founder and CEO, bit.bio

 

 

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