ProfessorYuval Elani

A full description of our research interests can be found on our group website: www.elanigroup.org. Current group research directions include:

Artificial cells

Automation for engineering biology  
Synthetic biology
Drug delivery
Vaccine technologies
Biosensors
Soft matter particle manufacture
Biotechnology
Biomembrane engineering
Microfluidics
Optical tweezers
Microreactors
Membrane Mechanics

Yuval leads a multi-disciplinary group that develop new biochemical technologies that can be exploited in the fundamental and applied sciences. Our core themes are:

1. ARTIFICIAL CELLS. We design and build synthetic cells that possess behaviours that are the hallmarks of life: motility, energy generation, communication, replication, computation, protein production, self-repair, and evolution. We are seeking to exploit these behaviours in biomedical contexts (including synthetic cell therapies).

2. MICROFLUIDICS. We are constantly developing new state-of-the-art microfluidic technologies for synthetic biology applications, as well as to address challenges identified by our academic, industrial and clinical collaborators. These include continuous flow and microdroplet technologies, as well as opto-fluidic tools.

3. SOFT PARTICLE ENGINEERING. We develop new platforms which enable precision engineering of nano/micro-scale soft particles with user-defined architectures. We can control the shape, molecular topology, number of compartments, lipid composition, membrane asymmetry, phase, compartment connectivity, and encapsulated cargo of the particles. We are particularly interested in designing novel stimuli-responsive membranes that can release content in response to various intrinsic/extrinsic cues (temperature, light, magnetic fields, acoustic waves, pH, hypoxia). These particles are being developed for drug and vaccine delivery and for microreactor applications.

4. BIOMIMETIC CELL MODELS. By blurring the boundaries between living and non-living matter, we use artificial cells as highly-controlled models to answer fundamental questions of biological/biomedical relevance, and as tools that feed into drug/agrichem discovery pipelines.

5. CELLULAR BIONICS. We are interested in fusing our engineered (inanimate) biochemical microsystems with biological cells to yield living/synthetic composite systems. We embed living cells in synthetic ones, engineer them to act as organelles within the hybrid entity, and create populations of interacting living and synthetic cells

6. ENGINEERING SOLUTIONS. We develop technologies to bypass bottlenecks that are hindering the deployment of artificial cells in real-world applications. These include scaling up generation throughput through new manufacturing strategies, scaling down their size, and increasing their shelf-life and life-time.