Synbio Academic Collaborates with AstraZeneca and Smartox Biotechnology

Dr. Cheryl Woolhead has been awarded a 3 year EPSRC project grant of £0.5M, jointly with Dr. Michele Zagnoni of the Electronic and Electrical Engineering department at the University of Strathclyde, to research intracellular ion channel drug discovery using droplet-based microfluidics. This synthetic biology project will exploiet Dr Woolheads expertise in cell-free approaches for synthesizing intracellular chloride ion channels, that have been implicated in human disease, and investigate their response to drugs in a medium-throughput microfluidic system that is capable of mimicking physiological intracellular membranes. Drug sensitivity will be screened against libraries of both synthetic and natural compounds provided by the projects industrial collaborators, AstraZeneca and Smartox Biotechnology.