Coordinator: Pia Cosma

In the Systems and Synthetic Biology program we are transforming molecular biology into a predictive engineering science.  Decades of molecular biology and genomics have given us a good description of the parts of biological systems and a reasonable conceptual understanding of how they function and fail to cause disease.  However, our ability to quantitatively understand, predict and engineer biological systems is still very limited and we cannot easily engineer biology in the same way that we can engineer cars, bridges and computers.  In the SSB program we combine large-scale quantitative data generation with modelling and machine learning to solve the foundational science to make molecular biology predictive and programmable.  Part of our work is performed through a joint-initiative with EMBL Barcelona, the Barcelona Collaboratorium for Modelling and Predictive Biology.  We believe the transformation of biology into a quantitative engineering science is the most important technological challenge of our time and that fast biological engineering will transform medicine and many industries.