A half-day international symposium titled “Design, Construction & Testing of Biological Systems
for Human Therapeutics” will be held at the Cochin University of Science and Technology on
August 19 th 2024.

We are now living in an era where the myriad promises and applications of synthetic biology
(SynBio) is becoming a reality, powered by the emergence of frontier technologies to
understand and engineer biological systems. One major application of SynBio is to develop
innovative therapeutics against various human diseases, with enhanced precision and efficacy.
Several of such engineered drug modalities have already been approved for human clinical use
recently, validating how SynBio can better human health. The aim of this symposium is to bring
world leaders conducting drug-discovery focused original research using synthetic and systems
biology approaches, to share their first-hand inventive examples on therapeutics development
and decoding of complex biology.

The international keynote speakers of the symposium include Dr. Sachdev Sidhu (Professor
and entrepreneur in residence in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Waterloo,
Canada), a leading authority of engineered monoclonal antibody drug discovery and
development. Some of the drugs developed by companies founded by Dr. Sidhu have been
evaluated in human clinicals trials and acquired by global pharmaceutical giants.

Prof. Stephen Michnick (University of Montreal, Canada), another keynote speaker, deploys
innovative approaches to understand and measure biological systems using synthetic and
systems biology. The third international speaker, Prof. Clarence Ronald Geyer (University of
Saskatchewan), will speak about his efforts in developing monoclonal antibodies for both
therapeutic as well as in vivo visualization of biological systems. Dr. Raju Rhee (Project
coordinator, Kerala Genome Data Centre, KGDC), will speak about the mission of KGDC to
generate and catalogue the genomic data of selected biota of Kerala, and how that will pave the
way for propelling SynBio based bio economy growth in Kerala.

The symposium is jointly hosted by CUSAT based CV Jacob Centre for Synthetic Biology and
Biomanufacturing, and Alstonia Bio. The CVJ Center is a recent initiative by Synthite
Industries and CUSAT to create a center of excellence in synthetic biology and
biomanufacturing. Alstonia Bio is a biotechnology startup company incubated at the SciGenom
Labs (Kochi) and led by Sam Santhosh, aiming to develop new generation of engineered
human therapeutics, as well as to establish a biofoundry in Kochi to build synthetic biology
based biotech ecosystem.