by Nathanael Willms
Earlier this month, on Wednesday March 6th, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the 2nd Annual Canada SynBio Conference at the MaRS Discovery Centre in Toronto, along with some of the members of iGEM Guelph (more on them in a later post). The conference was hosted by SynBio Canada, Genome Canada, Ontario Genomics, and NSERC, among others, with the purpose of fostering and promoting a strong synthetic biology community in Canada. Through a number of panels featuring topics as diverse as healthcare, agriculture, industry, cannabis, and the optimization of synthetic biology, experts spoke insightfully about the exciting challenges and opportunities for the field at the present moment.
The day produced a number of memorable highlights.
Following his opening keynote address, Dr. George Church, Harvard Professor and the founder of PersonalGenomes.org - often called “the godfather of synthetic biology” - was questioned about what he saw as the proper place for human germ-line gene therapy, in light of the procedure performed last year on twin fetuses in China by Dr. He Jiankui. Dr. Church replied that while he sees human germ-line therapy as a positive tool with which we can treat many currently incurable genetic disorders, he worries about the distribution of that technology, as the treatment will likely be initially restricted to wealthy countries, leaving poorer countries at a disadvantage. Dr. Ubaka Ugbogu, Associate Professor at the University of Alberta, also brought the question of global distribution to the forefront during the panel on human health and engineering biology.
Dr. Christina Agapakis, Creative Director at Ginkgo Bioworks, gave an entertaining lecture about how the synthetic biology community should relate to the general public, stressing the need to engage with people’s concerns about genetically modified organisms honestly and to promote the positive things that we can achieve with synthetic biology, especially given the poor presentation given of the field in the past often due to the unethical and disconnected actions of large genetically engineered crop companies.
Dr. Vince Martin, Professor at Concordia University, enthusiastically promoted the opening of the new Centre for Applied Synthetic Biology at his institution this year as part of the “Making Biology Easier to Engineer” panel. This is a very exciting development, as it marks the creation of the first “foundry”-style synthetic biology facility in Canada. The foundry approach, pioneered in Boston, involves the combination of artificial intelligence, human planning, and machine- conducted modeling and experimentation in a complex process to discover the optimal protein structure for any given biochemical task in a matter of days, and opens many new possibilities for researchers and biotechnologists in this country.
As a sideshow during the conference, undergraduate students from all over Canada participating in iGEM (an international, cross-disciplinary, student-lead synthetic biology competition held in Boston each year) were able to present their projects to conference-goers, who then voted on the project they liked the best. The winning team was iGEM Guelph, who took home a prize of $200 (great job, guys!).
All in all, the Canada SynBio 2019 conference was a success, and I am sure that many exciting things are to come this year for synthetic biology in Canada!
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