A microbial platform for manufacturing plant-inspired human therapeutics

Abstract
Plants produce some of the most potent human therapeutics and have been used for millennia to treat illnesses. Despite the huge repertoire of plant-derived pharmaceuti-cals, most of these products do not make it to the market because they are found in minute quantities in plants, are difficult to extract, and hard to protect commercially, ultimately constraining both supplies and further development of plant-derived thera-pies for unmet needs. This seminar will showcase a biotechnological solution to sour-cing plant-derived pharmaceuticals by means of fermentation-based manufacturing. It will also provide an example of how our research has developed from basic bioen-gineering and development of synthetic biology tools to a translational project recent-ly spun out from DTU. As such, the seminar will aim to introduce the audience to the science behind the technologies developed to tackle a societal need, and the journey towards the development of a start-up aiming to discover and manufacture plant-inspired human therapeutics.      

Bio
Michael Krogh Jensen is a senior researcher and group leader at Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). He holds a PhD in molecular biology from University of Copenhagen and did his postdoctoral training at the Max-Planck Institute (GER) and at Stanford University (US), before joining DTU in 2013. He is the author of >70 peer-reviewed publications, several book chapters, and inventor of 4 patents. He co-founded Biomia in 2022 following licensing agreement of a patent-portfolio from DTU.

Contact
Thomas Tørring, thomast@bce.au.dk