Synthetic Biology is a new area of biotechnology that can help to design, test and build new biological parts, devices and systems. Being a relatively new field, there is a lot of work being done it in worldwide, and researchers in Pakistan are also looking in to this field with great interest.
SynBioKP is a project of the Annual Development Program 2015-16 of the Science, Technology and Information Technology (ST&IT) Department of the Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with the aim to promote and facilitate the propagation synthetic biology in academia and industry to bring about economic transformation and social change in the province.
The principal investigator for SynBioKP is Dr. Faisal Khan, the founding director of the Institute of Integrative Biosciences at CECOS University, Peshawar, a member of the KP IT Board, the Advisory Committee at the Directorate of Science and Technology, the Higher Education Research Endowment Fund and the KP Youth Development Commission. Furthermore, he is also the brain behind Peshawar 2.0 that runs Basecamp, a coworking space, and Revolt ‘the startup factory’ in Peshawar.
To add more feathers to his cap he has also successful led two teams to the iGem competition in Boston winning bronze and silver medals in 2016 and 2017 respectively.
Recently, in an interview with the MIT Technology Review Pakistan, speaking about the technology being used in this field for research he said that machine learning and Artificial Intelligence have also entered the field because huge datasets are now available for work.
“As a researcher, sometimes I don’t even need to come to a lab, if I have my laptop and an Internet connection. Look at it this way: every living organism or species has its own unique DNA content or genome. There are millions of species, so millions of genomic sequence data is out there. Most of these and many other kinds of sequence data is already available in the public domain free of cost. You just need to browse them, ask the right kind of questions and dig out your answers.” He said.
In the interview talking about genome research in Pakistan, he said that there are high-tech equipment for sequencing thousands of genomes in Pakistan as well. For example, the Aga Khan University in Karachi and Rahman Medical Institute in Peshawar have state-of-the-art Illumina machines and that they have received a grant to launch a Precision Medicine Lab to undertake the country’s first ever National Cancer Genome Project. He further added that, “We plan to sequence DNA samples from 100 cancer patients initially to improve our understanding of different types of cancers and propose more targeted (hence precision) and effective treatment options.”
Speaking about how synthetic biology can be used in the country, he said that
“designing genetic circuits on computers, and then getting them printed chemically using over the cloud services. You can put the printed DNA circuit into your bacteria and yeast and make different products of choice. For example, you can make rose oil, without needing roses, spider silk without the need for rearing spiders and valuable drugs that are only found in rare herbs, without needing the herbs anymore. You can also go slightly more intelligent and build biosensors that take an input and give out an output on the basis of some problem they solve.”
As of current, according to Dr. Faisal Khan there are dozens of students being trained at SynBio and there are many biotechnology graduates who are unemployed, and if we put all of them together this field can reach many milestones in the country and help meet needs as it is a field that does not require PhD labs and with the emergence of Do It Yourself (DIY) Labs the cost is also comparatively less.
