MUIRO invites you to attend the workshop organized in Faculty of Pharmacy, entitled:
"Towards a vibrant low-carbon bio-based economy in Egypt: the use of synthetic biology and advanced industrial biotechnology for an accelerated transition"

Date: Saturday 4th March 2017.
Venue: Faculty of Pharmacy, Mansoura University

The workshop will bring together speakers from academic, industrial and commercial backgrounds and will provide insights on how synthetic biology and industrial biotechnology can address some of the challenges that face the Egyptian economy.

Synthetic biology is an emerging field of science that combines biology and engineering and aims at:
1) the design and construction of new biological parts, devices and systems,
2) the re-design of existing, natural biological systems for useful purposes. This emerging field is expected to impact many sectors of the economy (e.g. the chemical, environmental, health and energy sectors) and to contribute to economic growth.

Speakers
1- Dr Wael Houssen (Mansoura University and University of Aberdeen). Dr Houssen is an Assistant Professor Faculty of Pharmacy Mansoura University currently on a Sabbatical leave at University of Aberdeen UK in which he is holding a position of a senior research fellow. He leads a group of researchers at the Institute of Medical Sciences (IMS) working toward recruiting engineered biosynthetic enzymes to make novel therapeutically-active modified cyclic peptides as well as using synthetic biology to develop an in vivo production platform for these valuable compounds. Dr Houssen has obtained a BSc in Pharmaceutical Sciences and an MSc in pharmacognosy from Mansoura University, Egypt, a PhD in chemistry of natural products from University of Aberdeen and a postgraduate certificate (with distinction) in protein crystallography from Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the recipient of the Belgian Development Co-operation prize (2001) and the prestigious UK SULSA Leaders award (2013). He has used the latter fund to get intensive training in advanced genome mining at University of Helsinki, and industrial scale production and purification of enzymes at Chirotech Ltd., Cambridge. Dr Houssen has published over 40 research articles of which many are in high impact Journals. Dr Houssen has a very good experience in raising fund for research. He is a Co-applicant on many successful grant applications [a total of £4.7 M was raised from 8 successful awards in the last couple of years]. Dr Houssen has been selected as an external committee member for two PhD students from University of Louisiana at Monroe, USA and in 2015, he acted as an advisor to Ripptide Pharma, a new spin-off company that will develop novel macrocycles with the potential to treat complex diseases.

2- Dr Ian Fotheringham [Managing Director, Ingenza Ltd, UK].
Ian Fotheringham received a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Glasgow, UK in 1986. He then joined the NutraSweet division of Monsanto in Chicago, USA, engineering microbes to produce the Aspartame® sweetener, in one of the first and largest scale successes of synthetic biology and enzyme evolution. From 1993 he continued developing large scale bioprocesses with NSC Technologies and Great Lakes Fine Chemicals. In 2003 he co-founded Ingenza, an Edinburgh, UK, based SME, now a leading Industrial Biotechnology and Synthetic Biology company. Over the past 13 years, Ingenza has amassed an extensive and unique range of critical and proprietary enabling technologies in microbial strain and cell line improvement, synthetic biology, fermentation and bioprocess development. Dr. Fotheringham has published 35 papers and articles, holds 8 current patents and oversees Ingenza’s biotechnology strategy.
Ingenza is providing a new generation of manufacturing technologies to industries worldwide, focussing on sustainable and ethical raw materials and the use of fermentation based processes that generate minimal waste. Ingenza’s expertise in protein production, strain improvement, fermentation, high throughput screening and synthetic chemistry is being applied with partners and customers worldwide in the fields of biologics manufacture, industrial biotechnology and synthetic biology for the manufacture of peptide/protein pharmaceuticals chemicals, polymers, animal feed, natural products and next generation biofuels. Ingenza also prepares cGMP compliant production organisms and processes using single use fermentors, to improve the yield, quality and cost competitiveness of biologic manufacture. Ingenza employs 44 staff (12 Ph. D scientists and 20 B.Sc/M.Sc scientists) in its 7,000 sq/ft Roslin molecular biology, fermentation, DSP and chem/bioprocess laboratories.

3- Mr Paul Goddard (Former CEO of Protein Technologies Ltd, UK)
Paul Goddard has over thirty-five years experience of high-technology industries in Europe, the US and Asia and has a broad knowledge of the life sciences and electronics. He began his industrial career in 1980 with ITT-STC developing System X – the UK’s first digital switching telephone exchange system.
Between 1983 and 1986, he was Distribution Manager at Hitachi Electronic Components, London, where he managed the company’s network of nine distributors in the UK and Scandinavia marketing microprocessors, memory and speech chips, LCD’s and optoelectronics. In 1986, he moved to Japan where he worked as an industrial consultant to a number of major Japanese corporations including Sony, Matsushita, Kiei-Kogyo, Kraft Foods Japan and Makita.
In 1990, he returned to the UK and took up a position as UK Sales Manager for Ajinomoto – the largest food company in Asia and the world’s largest producer of amino acids. During his time in charge of Ajinomoto UK, he negotiated a number of high-value outsourcing contracts with major pharmaceutical companies including a £220 million multi-site R&D contract with GlaxoSmithKline for the production of Valaciclovir – the largest outsourcing contract the company ever concluded.
In 2006, Paul became Commercial Director of CoEBio3 – the UK’s premier industrial/academic organization working in the field of industrial biotechnology – where he project-managed the development of novel industrial processes for a number of blue-chip majors including Shell.
Between 2011 and 2015, Paul Goddard was CEO of the UK SME Protein Technologies Ltd. Amongst other achievements, the company patented two world-leading products: DeepRed1, the smallest and brightest infrared protein currently known and CryoRed, the first fluorescent protein to be able to detect the formation of ice-crystals. During his time at PTL, Paul also won major awards for the development of energy-free water purification technology from various funding bodies including the Gates Foundation.

Programme
09:30 ‒ 10:30 Registration
10:30 ‒ 11:00 Speaker 1 (Wael Houssen)
“Delivering Economic Value from Synthetic Biology”
11:00 ‒ 11:45 Speaker 2 (Ian Fotheringham)
“Engineering Bacteria and Yeast for Next Generation Manufacturing”
11.45 ‒ 12:15 Coffee Break and networking
12:15 ‒ 13:00 Speaker 3 (Paul Goddard)
“The Large-scale Processing of Microalgae - Past Achievements and Future Challenges”
13:00 ‒ 13:30 Speaker 4 (Wael Houssen)
Synthetic Biology and Drug Discovery
13:30 ‒ 14.00 Discussion