At the Biotechnical Faculty, and in collaboration with the Society of student microbiologist of Slovenia (DŠMBS), we have organized 3-day Microbiological Summer School with practical courses in the laboratories of Biotechnical faculty. The Summer school integrated practical activities of students working in the laboratories, as well as morning lectures, with lecturers from different faculties (including Biotechnical faculty, Faculty for Pharmacy) and other institutions such as University hospital »clinical center«, and industry including lecturers from Acies Bio d.o.o.,, Lek d.d., Krka d.d., CO COBIK etc. Lectures covered various areas of the antibiotic drug discovery and development, proces development, biosynthesis, production and use of antibiotics. The Summer school was very succesful, considering arround 90 students participated during 3 day course.
B.01 Organiser of a scientific meeting
COBISS.SI-ID: 4435576By applying industrial process at large scale, Lek/Sandoz is producing FK506 (tacrolimus) commercially. FK506 is important immunosuppressive drug used mainly after allogeneic organ transplant to lower the risk of organ rejection. This is granted patent in the USA, based on patent application (US 8980585 (B2)), which was submitted in 2011 by researchers from Sandoz and Acies Bio. Patent is protecting the use of complex enzymatic system encoding biosynthesis of unusual extender units allylmalonyl-CoA and ethylmalonyl-CoA. Inventors have demonstrated that by manipulation of this enzymatic system, it is possible to improve biosynthetic process for FK506 production, particularly lowering presence of FK506-structure related impurities. The presence of undesired impurities is significantly increasing cost of the downstream processes. Thus, this discovery has high industrial value.
F.32 International patent
COBISS.SI-ID: 4523896In the scope of its drug discovery program Acies Bio uses approaches of biosynthetic engineering, chemobiosyntehsis/mutasynthesis and semisyntheticchemistry. Based on the properties of the unusual acyltransferase domain of the FK506 polyketide synthase we have developed a novel mutasynthetic approach, which enables incorporation of unnatural extender units into different sites of polyketide structures. Extender units are selected to enable subsequent optimization of the compounds by semisynthetic chemistry. Based on this invention Acies Bio filed a patent application (WO 2012/089349, PCT/EP2011/006615).
F.32 International patent
COBISS.SI-ID: 4162936Based on invited lecture, authors presented in the review article development of new tetracycline antibiotics, which has progressed very rapidly during last decade. These include the tetracyclines of the third generation, so-called glycylcyclines, of which one is already being used in the clinic, while two additional tetracycline analogs are in the proces of advanced clinical evaluation. In addition, authors presented recent results in the development of the synthetic tetracyclines as well as biosynthetic efforts in the development of so-called »atypical« tetracyclines by applying synthetic biology approaches. Authors presented their own contribution related to the development of new tetracycline matrices by applying biosynthetic engineering approaches. Based on the lecture review article was published by the Croatian Ecademy of Engineers (2014, p. 19-32.)
B.04 Guest lecture
COBISS.SI-ID: 4434040The project leader was awarded by Slovenian research agency (ARRS) for his research achievement.
E.01 National awards
COBISS.SI-ID: 4745592