3 Questions for Prof. Sven Panke

This time the "3 Questions For" series features Prof. Sven Panke from ETH Zürich in Switzerland. Prof. Sven Panke currently holds a position as Professor at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering. His research focuses on the design of novel bioprocesses for the pharmaceutical and chemical industry.

When and why did you move into the field of synthetic biology?

I moved into Synthetic Biology in the early 2000s, when the topic was about to emerge in Europe. The engineering vision behind it displayed a very big attraction to me, even if it was clear from the very beginning that a simple transfer of engineering principles from classical engineering disciplines to biology would not work. However, the engineering narrative and the DNA synthesis methods seemed to promise a major improvement about earlier biological engineering methods. Another important factor was iGEM – a totally novel way of communicating a field to students and making them enthusiastic about it.

Since then, I stayed in Synthetic Biology because I think that it remains the most promising route to better strains in industrial biotechnology and in many neighboring fields, generating visionary projects that can capture the imagination of scientists from many different backgrounds.

What is the single most important piece of advice that you would give to a current PhD student or a post-doc?

Consider ignoring the advice of senior colleagues.

What do you think is presently the major limiting factor for progress in the field of synthetic biology?

I am not sure that I can name one factor that is more important than others. think that one major limiting factor is the time it takes to integrate of all the qualitative knowledge that we have accumulated over the years in computationally supported design platforms. We are making considerable advances there, but the process will, I fear, take another 10 years. I also think that we are becoming very good at certain aspects of synthetic biology, e.g. pathway optimization, but in the end this is only a certain aspect of the overall path from idea to real world impact – I think many projects still fail at an entirely different level, such as “this enzyme does not work in my chassis strain”, for whatever reason. And we should not forget that even if you have a good strain, you are still far away from having a good process. Finally, at some point we will return to the discussions that we had already once before, whether genetic engineering/synthetic biology is safe enough to be used outside contained facilities. The outcome of this discussion will have, I think, a strong impact on the future of synthetic biology outside of medicine.