We collaborate with academic, commercial and government partners to pioneer and deploy innovative biological solutions using synthetic biology. We leverage bioprocessing technology for cell-based therapies, contributing to advancements in healthcare. Our team works comprehensively, working from whole organisms to DNA to harness unique biological capabilities.
Engineered Biology for Underwater & Ground Sensors
In partnership with DARPA, Draper leads a diverse team to develop an interactive platform for designing microbe-based sense-and-respond devices for monitoring Department of Defense environments.
DARPA’s new Tellus program aims to identify the chemical and physical signals microbial devices can detect, their environmental tolerances, and the types of output signals they can generate. Tellus focuses on creating agile, robust, reliable, and durable microbial sensors for environmental monitoring.
Additional Information
Biothreat Prediction
The Cloud Computing for Paratope-Epitope Prediction (C2PEP) project, funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity (IARPA) Biointelligence and Biosecurity for the Intelligence Community (B24IC) Program, aims to improve the ability to identify an antibody’s viral target antigen quickly, prior to any experimental characterization.
This allows the number of potential targets to be reduced to a number that can be evaluated experimentally. Antibodies are crucial in the adaptive immune response, recognizing pathogens by binding to foreign proteins called antigens. The specific region on the antigen where the antibody binds, known as the epitope, is vital for preventing infection and determining if the antibody will bind to a specific antigen strain or cross-react with other viral variants. Currently, identifying an antibody’s antigen and epitope is mainly done experimentally, which is time- and resource-intensive and requires prior knowledge of the pathogen. Reducing the search space using these computational tools will accelerate the identification of the epitope.
The C2PEP program aims to identify the target pathogen, antigen, and epitope of novel antibodies across the entire viral proteome in hours.
To enhance epitope prediction, we are developing a bioinformatics pipeline that predicts conserved epitopes across viral evolution. The C2PEP Pipeline is modular, easily customizable, and is fully automated, requiring only the virus family and protein names as inputs.
The pipeline framework is adaptable for other applications, including antibody/antigen predictions and protein-protein interactions which has applications in the development of new approach for for surveillance &, detection, diagnostics, and medical countermeasure developments. This project serves as a proof of principle a pipeline capable of predicting paratope-epitope pairs across the viral proteome.
Human Skin Microbiome Model
Draper scientists and engineers have been working to better understand health and disease that are modulated by the skin microbiota; the bacteria, yeast and viruses that inhabit the human epidermis in a symbiotic relationship with the host.
Pharmaceutical and wellness companies are paying increasing attention to the microbiome’s role in both healthy skin maintenance as well as conditions such as psoriasis and atopic dermatitis. To support a better understanding of the host: microbe interactions and their perturbations, Draper has recreated aspects of this ecosystem in a lab setting by developing SURFACE (skin ubiome Reconstruction for Assessment of Cutaneous Effects), an in vitro model of the human skin microbiome comprising a 6-strain bacterial consortium colonizing primary human keratinocyte (skin) tissue for up to seven days. This model can be used to test and evaluate the influence of microbiome on skin diseases to better understand treatment options.
Detecting GMOs
At Draper, we addressed the need for genetic context as part of FELIX, or the “Finding Engineering-Linked Indicators” program.
Funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the FELIX program sought to develop technology for rapid, accurate, and cost-effective detection of GMOs.
The goal of FELIX is to find engineered organisms within a mixed sample containing potentially millions of unmodified organisms. Our solution combines a miniaturized microarray capture device—a novel application of DNA hybridization—and a computational pipeline and dashboard that displays actionable information.
Similar in size to a postage stamp, our technology can detect genetic engineering in any biological organism and can analyze samples from complex, multi-species environments. In addition to demonstrating a dramatically better signal-to-noise ratio than existing methods, the accompanying computational pipeline we developed enables analysis and interpretation of the data, simplifying the identification of genetically engineered regions using next-generation sequencing data.
Another advantage of the Draper technology is the wet-lab process does not destroy the sample enabling the sample to be preserved for additional types of analysis.
