How can molecular systems engineering improve society? That’s the core question that a cohort of researchers from around the world discussed during a workshop in Paris, France.
From June 22–26, the University of Chicago’s International Institute for Research in Paris hosted an inaugural “Frontiers of Molecular Systems Engineering Applied to Societal Problems” workshop. During the four-day event, the attendees discussed the potential for molecular systems engineering for health equity, immunology, food sustainability, and other applications.
The workshop marks the first year of the International Institute for Research in Paris, said Matthew Tirrell, D. Gale Johnson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and co-chair of the workshop’s organizing committee.
It was also the first time all the European and U.S. universities with a molecular systems engineering program organized a workshop together to focus on specific problems and approaches to them through the lens of molecular engineering. The workshop featured speakers from Imperial College London in the U.K., Heidelberg University in Germany, Collège de France in France, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and Wageningen University in the Netherlands, among others.
The workshop was meant “to expand people’s understanding of the power of molecular systems engineering and interest more people in these lines of research around the world,” Tirrell said.
Of the roughly 75 workshop attendees, about a third were students, Tirrell said. The program presented many opportunities for students to present their work and discuss it with faculty and world-renowned molecular systems engineers. Events included two poster sessions for students and postdocs, a panel discussion for master’s students on molecular engineering opportunities, a student talk during the Energy Transition session, and many networking opportunities.
One student participant was Colleen Foley, a PhD candidate at the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.
During the workshop, Foley and her collaborators presented new research stemming from their immunophysiology studies of lymphatic vessels and their impact on anti-tumor immune response, Foley said. Their presentation demonstrated new in vitro and in vivo models to show how tumors with high lymphatic vessel density respond to immunotherapy and radiotherapy. The systems immunophysiology perspective that the Swartz Lab takes contributes to more robust insights into the mechanisms of immunotherapy response.
The lymphatic system remains an understudied part of the body, but Foley and her collaborators take a systems engineering approach to understand the role it plays in many diseases, which brings new perspectives into immunotherapy response to cancer, she said. Such research could identify mechanisms by which cancers with high lymphatic density respond to therapy, which can impact how patients with these tumors are treated, she added.
For Foley, who attended the workshop with UChicago PME Professor Melody Swartz and doctoral student Camryn Garza, the workshop provided an opportunity to meet with researchers who addressed different problems using the same systems molecular engineering perspective, offering new ways of thinking around their goal of investigating lymphatic immunobiology.
“The idea of the conference of bringing together molecular engineers from all different disciplines is really exciting,” Foley said. “Being able to hear from people who are working on very different problems opens you up to more ideas about the applications of systems engineering.”
UChicago PME postdoctoral researcher Aman Agrawal from the Tirrell and Szostak labs also gave a talk related to the origins of life on Earth. Agrawal centers on understanding how life originated on Earth four billion years ago by examining RNA.
As part of his talk, he walked attendees through his and his colleagues’ efforts to reconstruct a primitive version of a cell to understand how it might have replicated and evolved into what cells are today. The mix of researchers across various disciplines offers the chance to receive feedback on his research from other researchers, Agrawal said.
“I think this is a good audience for me to present my work. It’s the appropriate audience for me to get great feedback,” Agrawal said. “It's an excellent opportunity to give a talk to this highly interdisciplinary collection of researchers and then being able to talk to them, answer their questions, and understand what we might be missing and maybe collaborate with them, because that's always fun.”
Other UChicago PME participants included Pamela Cai, postdoctoral researcher, and Carlos Medina Jimenez, PhD candidate from the Tirrell Lab, and Maria Ley Flores, PhD candidate from the de Pablo Lab. Poster prize winners included Camryn Garza and Carlos Medina Jimenez.
Content from this workshop will be published as a Perspective article in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Molecular Systems Design & Engineering (MSDE) journal.
