The Genetics Podcast

EP 122: Building genome-scale engineered cells for biotechnology with Leslie Mitchell, Co-founder and CEO of Neochromosome

Summary:

0:00 Introduction

01:01 How Leslie got into the field of synthetic biology and engineering, and her career journey so far

02:45 What Leslie accomplished during her postdoc and recent transformations in the field of genomics

05:57 The impacts of non-coding regions of the genome and the outcome of deletions

08:20 How long it takes to make chromosomes, what does it cost, and what can we expect from the future of chromosome engineering

10:03 The inspiration behind Neochromsome and Leslie’s transition to industry from academia

13:05 From understanding the fundamentals of the genome to identifying industrial applications for genome-scale engineering

16:46 Potential gene therapy applications for the NeoYeast and NeoVector products

19:10 The power of delivering to cells using a 10-150 kilobase payload compared with lentivirus vectors

20:05 An explanation of yeast as a compact genome with few introns

21:48 How Neochrosome has developed a genome-rewritten yeast designed for incorporating non-canonical amino acids into proteins

24:10 The challenges of identifying scalable solutions

25:27 The process behind constructing an entire synthetic chromosome

27:38 The different methods for assembling DNA

28:28 How to scale the chromosome construction process in terms of both throughput and length

30:54 The biggest barriers to a gene therapy application of this technology

32:35 The lessons learned from yeast and whether they also apply to mammalian cells

34:14 The potential application of these technologies that Leslie is most excited about

35:00 Closing remarks

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