iGEM Munich wins Best Diagnostics prize

The iGEM Mu­nich team is made up of stu­dents from the two lead­ing uni­versi­ties in Mu­nich, LMU and TUM. This year, the team also in­clud­ed stu­dents from the Elite Grad­uate Pro­grams "Hu­man Biol­ogy – Prin­ciples of Health and Dis­ease" and "Re­spon­sibil­ity in Sci­ence, Engi­neer­ing, and Tech­nolo­gy".

Our team pre­sent­ed InkSight, a tattoo made from genet­ically modi­fied mammali­an cells for con­tinu­ous moni­toring of bi­omarkers. Fluc­tua­tions in bi­omarker con­cen­tra­tions are made di­rectly visible via a pig­men­tation change of the tattoo driven by mela­nin. En­cap­sulin nanocages with tyro­si­nases ensure local­ized, safe mela­nin pro­duc­tion. The bi­omarker sens­ing is achieved with the Mod­ular Ex­tracel­lular Sen­sor Archi­tec­ture (ME­SA). InkSight is thus the first con­tinu­ous, cell-based tattoo bio­sensor with visual out­put, creat­ing an inno­vative plat­form for de­cen­tral­ized diag­nos­tics and per­sonal­ized medi­cine. This pro­ject com­bines syn­thetic biolo­gy, bio­engi­neer­ing, and a trans­la­tional ap­proach in a pa­tient-oriented bio­sen­sor.

Our work for iGEM ex­tends far be­yond labor­atory exper­iments. Over the past year, we brought syn­thetic biolo­gy topics to the public and ena­bled school stu­dents to gain hands-on ex­peri­ence in the lab. Dur­ing Girls’ Day and iGEM@School, we su­pervised exper­iments, evalu­ated data, ana­lyzed prob­lems, and taught the basics of Py­thon. Par­tici­pants from high school also had the op­por­tunity to ex­plore dif­ferent study pro­grams. 

In addi­tion, we de­veloped soft­ware for the rapid crea­tion of new ME­SA recep­tors, which was awarded the prize for Best Soft­ware Tool. All exper­iments, re­sults, and out­reach activi­ties are doc­umented on our wiki–from the pro­ject over­view and anal­yses to in­struc­tional vide­os. The web­site re­ceived the award for Best Wiki for its struc­ture and prac­tical rele­vance and now serves as a model for future iGEM teams.

The Grand Jam­boree in Paris gave us the op­por­tunity to pre­sent our pro­ject and re­search to teams from around the world and ex­perts from sci­ence and indus­try in a live presentation and at our booth. We are also proud to have been nomi­nated for all the prizes we were aim­ing for, to have placed in the Top 10 out of over 400 teams, and to have been awarded the prize for Best Diag­nos­tics pro­ject. In addi­tion, the team once again brought home a gold medal for “Ex­cel­lence in Syn­thetic Biol­ogy” to Mu­nich! Our jour­ney would not have been possi­ble with­out the sup­port of our spon­sors, in­clud­ing the Elite Net­work of Ba­varia. 

Fur­ther de­tails about the pro­ject can be found in our wiki: 2025.igem.wiki/munich/ or in our presentation: www.youtube.com/watch!

Text: Natalia Kuźmierkiewicz, Elite Graduate Program, “Human Biology - Principles of Health and Disease”