Professor Shannon Sirk (MME) received the NIH NIBIB R21 Trailblazer Award for her ongoing work in engineering both microbes and antibodies for human therapies. This three-year, $400,000 award is designed to help engineers pursue research programs at the interface of the life sciences, engineering, and physical sciences.

A new paper co-written by a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign legal scholar who studies intellectual property protection for advanced biotechnologies advocates for a middle ground in patent claims involving antibodies, the backbone of modern bioscience.

Technological advancements over the past few decades have laid the groundwork for the use of microbe-based drugs to treat diseases. Bioengineering professor Shannon Sirk (MME) and her lab are engineering human commensal microbes into living therapeutics, delivering therapeutic proteins directly in the body, to make these drugs more accessible.