Simone Pignotti (Eligo Bioscience)
27/11/2025 10:30 - 12:00
Emplacement: Aurigny Room
Bacteriophages are nature’s delivery vehicles, evolved to inject genetic payloads into bacteria. At Eligo Bioscience, we treat them as programmable devices. By combining computational design with synthetic biology, we “re-program” phages to precisely kill pathogens —moving beyond broad-spectrum antibiotics— or edit bacterial genes within the complex human microbiome. Our mission is to transform this technology into groundbreaking gene-editing medicines to address unmet medical needs in inflammatory and infectious diseases, as well as oncology.
This talk will detail the technology, computational tools and data-driven strategies we use to achieve this, using examples from our key publications (including our 2024 Nature paper, In situ targeted base editing of bacteria in the mouse gut). Finally, I will present our perspective on the field’s greatest bioinformatics challenges, in hopes of inspiring new projects at the frontier of algorithms and synthetic biology.
Note: The talk will not be broadcasted on Webex.