Israeli college college students are engineering particular micro organism to stop hair loss brought on by chemotherapy. 

Chemotherapy is without doubt one of the most typical most cancers therapies, and causes injury to wholesome, residing tissues and oftentimes hair loss, amongst different extreme unwanted side effects.

But college students from the Technion in Haifa hope to synthetically produce Decursin, which deters hair loss, and incorporate it into shampoo, lotions and different merchandise. 

Decursin is a compound derived from the roots of the Angelica gigas, a plant grown completely in China and Korea.

​​It has many helpful properties together with the talents to suppress irritation, repress most cancers, and forestall apoptosis – or programmed cell loss of life, which incorporates hair cells.

The downside is that the plant accommodates lower than six per cent of this compound, and present extraction strategies are low-yielding, polluting, and complex, making Decursin extraordinarily costly. 

Students from the Technion are competing with their innovation on this yr’s International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competitors. 

It is an annual artificial biology competitors, the place groups of scholars from numerous fields work with mentors to construct genetically engineered techniques.

The competitors was based in 2004 on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has been held in Boston since its inception. Now, will probably be held for the primary time in Europe, on the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles conference heart in France. 

This yr, greater than 300 groups from all over the world will take part within the competitors, together with three from Israel – one from the Technion, one from Tel Aviv University, and one from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Prof Roee Amit, of the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Engineering and mentor of the Technion crew, stated: “Beyond participation and winning, it is important to understand that some of the developments by the Technion teams have already been turned into applied and commercial tracks and have a real impact in the world.

“One of the most prominent examples is Koracell, which was founded on the basis of the technology developed by our students in preparation for a competition iGEM in 2019.

“The group developed an innovative technology for the production of honey without bees using a genetically engineered bacterium. This technology allows the honey’s texture and taste to be precisely designed, and it is also a platform for simulating other natural metabolic processes.”



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