Synthetic Biology and Tissue Engineering

Synthetic biology (SB) is an emerging discipline, which is slowly reorienting the field of drug discovery. It  focuses on re-engineering bacteria and yeast for use as microscopic drug factories, and in the manipulation of mammalian gene expression. Synthetic biology designs biological devices (synthetic cells or cell-free system) to trigger a biological response with respect to input controlled signal. In Drug Discovery, such devices would be used to activate gene expression of biosynthetic units to explore  natural products -like chemical space. Genome editing tools give the possibility of following through reporter genes the action of a particular output signal, which is very useful to validate drug target or disease models as well as merging constraints from both Drug Discovery and drug production.