James Collins | |
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Born | James Joseph Collins June 26, 1965 New York City, New York, U.S. |
Alma mater | College of the Holy Cross (BA) Balliol College, Oxford (DPhil) |
Known for | Synthetic biology; discovery of halicin and abaucin |
Awards | Dickson Prize in Medicine HFSP Nakasone Award Max Delbruck Prize Feynman Prize Gabbay Award MacArthur Fellow National Academy of Sciences National Academy of Engineering National Academy of Medicine American Academy of Arts & Sciences |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Bioengineering Medical engineering |
Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Harvard University Boston University Wyss Institute |
Thesis | Joint Mechanics: Modeling of the Lower Limb (1990) |
Doctoral advisor | John O’Connor |
James Joseph Collins (born June 26, 1965) is an American bioengineer who serves as the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Collins conducted research showing that artificial intelligence (AI) approaches can be used to discover novel antibiotics, such as halicin and abaucin. He serves as the Director of the Antibiotics-AI Project at MIT, which is supported by The Audacious Project, and is the faculty lead for life sciences at the MIT Jameel Clinic.
Collins is one of the founders of the field of synthetic biology, and his work on synthetic gene circuits and programmable cells has led to the development of new classes of diagnostics and therapeutics, which have influenced research in detecting and treating infections caused by emerging pathogens such as Ebola, Zika, SARS-CoV-2, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. He is also a researcher in systems biology, having made discoveries regarding the actions of antibiotics and the emergence of antibiotic resistance. [1]
Collins is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, and the National Academy of Sciences, for his contributions to synthetic biology and engineered gene networks.
Collins was born on June 26, 1965. [2] He received a B.A. in physics, summa cum laude , from the College of the Holy Cross in 1987 as class valedictorian. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study medical engineering at the Balliol College, Oxford, where he earned a DPhil in 1990. [3] Currently, Collins is the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science and Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT. Collins is also a core founding faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and a member of the Broad Institute. Collins is also faculty lead for life sciences at the MIT Jameel Clinic since 2018. [4] [5]
From 1990 to 2014, he was on the faculty at Boston University, where he was a William F. Warren Distinguished Professor, a University Professor, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Professor of Medicine, and co-director of the Center for BioDynamics and Director of the Center of Synthetic Biology.
Collins has been involved with a number of start-up companies, and his inventions and technologies have been licensed by over 25 biotech and medical device companies. Collins is the scientific co-founder of several biotech companies and non-profit organizations.
Collins ran track and cross country at Holy Cross (he was a 4:17 miler), and earned a blue playing for the varsity basketball team at the University of Oxford.
This section may contain an excessive number of citations .(July 2023) |
Collins' work on synthetic gene circuits launched the field of synthetic biology. [6] He was the first (along with Michael Elowitz and Stanislas Leibler) to show that one can harness the biophysical properties of nucleic acids and proteins to create biological circuits, which can be used to rewire and reprogram living cells.
In a paper published in Nature , [7] Collins designed and constructed a genetic toggle switch – a synthetic, bistable gene regulatory network – in E. coli. The toggle switch forms a synthetic, addressable cellular memory unit with broad implications for biophysics, biomedicine and biotechnology. In the same issue of Nature, Elowitz and Leibler showed that one can build a synthetic genetic oscillator (called the repressilator) in E. coli. [8] Collins’ Nature paper on the genetic toggle switch [7] and Elowitz's and Leibler's Nature paper [8] on the repressilator are considered landmark pieces, ones that marks the beginnings of synthetic biology. [6]
Building on this work, Collins showed that synthetic gene networks can be used as regulatory modules and interfaced with a microbe's genetic circuitry to create programmable cells for a variety applications, [9] e.g., synthetic probiotics to serve as living diagnostics and living therapeutics to detect, treat and prevent infections such as cholera and C. difficile. [10] [11] He also designed and constructed engineered riboregulators (RNA switches) for sensing and control, [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] microbial kill switches and genetic counters for biocontainment, [18] [19] [20] synthetic bacteriophage to combat resistant bacterial infections, [21] [22] genetic switchboards for metabolic engineering, [23] and tunable genetic switches for gene and cell therapy. [24] [25] [26] Recently, Collins developed freeze-dried, cell-free synthetic gene circuits, an innovative platform that forms the basis for inexpensive, paper-based diagnostic tests for emerging pathogens (e.g., Zika, Ebola, SARS-CoV-2, antibiotic-resistant bacteria), [27] [28] [29] [30] wearable biosensors, [31] and portable biomolecular manufacturing (e.g., to produce vaccine antigens) in the developing world. [32]
In the context of synthetic biology and regenerative medicine, Collins collaborated with Derrick Rossi and George Q. Daley on a study using synthetic mRNA technology for biomedical applications. The team showed that synthetic mRNA could be used for highly efficient stem cell reprogramming and redifferentiation. This work was published in Cell Stem Cell in 2010, [33] and Rossi used this synthetic biology technology platform to found Moderna. [34]
Collins has also used synthetic biology approaches (computational and experimental) to identify and address significant biological physics questions regarding the regulation of gene expression and cell dynamics. Collins, for example, has utilized synthetic gene networks to study the effects of positive feedback in genetic modules, [35] [36] the role and origin of stochastic fluctuations in eukaryotic gene expression, [37] and the phenotypic consequences of gene expression noise and its effects on cell fate and microbial survival strategies in stressful environments. [38] Importantly, Collins has also demonstrated how synthetic gene circuits can be used to test, validate and improve qualitative and quantitative models of gene regulation, [39] and shown that biophysical theory and experiment can be coupled in bottom-up approaches to gain biological insights into the intricate processes of gene regulation. [40]
Collins is also one of the leading researchers in systems biology through the use of experimental-computational biophysical techniques to reverse engineer and analyze endogenous gene regulatory networks. [41] Collins and collaborators showed that reverse-engineered gene networks can be used to identify drug targets, biological mediators and disease biomarkers. [42]
Collins and collaborators discovered, using systems biology approaches, that all classes of bactericidal antibiotics induce a common oxidative damage cellular death pathway. [43] This finding indicates that targeting bacterials systems that remediate oxidative damage, including the SOS DNA damage response, is a viable means of enhancing the effectiveness of all major classes of antibiotics and limiting the emergence of antibiotic resistance. This work established a mechanistic relationship between bacterial metabolism and antibiotic efficacy, which was further developed and validated by Collins and his team in a series of follow-on studies. [44]
Collins showed that certain metabolites could be used to enable bactericidal antibiotics to eradicate persistent, tolerant infections. [45] Additionally, Collins and co-workers discovered that sublethal levels of antibiotics activate mutagenesis by stimulating the production of reactive oxygen species, leading to multidrug resistance. [46] Collins and colleagues, using their systems approaches, also discovered a population-based resistance mechanism constituting a form of kin selection whereby a small number of resistant bacterial mutants, in the face of antibiotic stress, can, at some cost to themselves, provide protection to other more vulnerable, cells, enhancing the survival capacity of the overall population in stressful environments. [47]
In 2020, Collins was part of the team—with fellow MIT Jameel Clinic faculty lead Professor Regina Barzilay—that announced the discovery through deep learning of halicin, the first new antibiotic compound for 30 years, which kills over 35 powerful bacteria, including antimicrobial-resistant tuberculosis, the superbug C. difficile, and two of the World Health Organization's top-three most deadly bacteria. [48] In 2020, Collins, Barzilay and the MIT Jameel Clinic were also awarded funding through The Audacious Project to create the Antibiotics-AI Project and expand on the discovery of halicin in using AI to respond to the antibiotic resistance crisis through the development of new classes of antibiotics. [49]
Collins also pioneered the development and use of nonlinear dynamical approaches to study, mimic and improve biological function, [50] expanding our ability to understand and harness the physics of living systems. Collins, for example, proposed that input noise could be used to enhance sensory function and motor control in humans. [51] [52] He and collaborators showed that touch sensation and balance control in young and older adults, patients with stroke, and patients with diabetic neuropathy could be improved with the application of sub-sensory mechanical noise, [53] e.g., via vibrating insoles. [54] This work has led to the creation of a new class of medical devices to address complications resulting from diabetic neuropathy, restore brain function following stroke, and improve elderly balance.
Collins' scientific accomplishments have been recognized by numerous awards, including the Dickson Prize in Medicine, the Sanofi-Institut Pasteur Award, the HFSP Nakasone Award, the Max Delbruck Prize, the Gabbay Award, the NIH Director's Pioneer Award, the Ellison Medical Foundation Senior Scholar Award in Aging, the inaugural Anthony J. Drexel Exceptional Achievement Award, the Lagrange Prize from the CRT Foundation in Italy, the BMES Robert A. Pritzker Award, the Promega Biotechnology Research Award, and being selected for Technology Review's inaugural TR100 100 young innovators who will shape the future of technology [55] – and the Scientific American 50 – the top 50 outstanding leaders in science and technology. [56]
Collins is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Physics, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. In 2003, he received a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Award", [57] becoming the first bioengineer to receive this honor. Collins' award citation noted, "Throughout his research, Collins demonstrates a proclivity for identifying abstract principles that underlie complex biological phenomena and for using these concepts to solve concrete, practical problems.". He was also honored as a Medical All-Star by the Boston Red Sox, and threw out the first pitch at a Red Sox game in Fenway Park. In 2016, Collins was named an Allen Distinguished Investigator by the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group. Collins is an elected member of all three U.S. national academies – the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Medicine. He is also an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a charter fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.
Collins has received teaching awards at Boston University, including the Biomedical Engineering Teacher of the Year Award, the College of Engineering Professor of the Year Award, and the Metcalf Cup and Prize for Excellence in Teaching, which is the highest teaching honor awarded by Boston University. [58]
Microevolution is the change in allele frequencies that occurs over time within a population. This change is due to four different processes: mutation, selection, gene flow and genetic drift. This change happens over a relatively short amount of time compared to the changes termed macroevolution.
A generegulatory network (GRN) is a collection of molecular regulators that interact with each other and with other substances in the cell to govern the gene expression levels of mRNA and proteins which, in turn, determine the function of the cell. GRN also play a central role in morphogenesis, the creation of body structures, which in turn is central to evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo).
Yeast artificial chromosomes (YACs) are genetically engineered chromosomes derived from the DNA of the yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is then ligated into a bacterial plasmid. By inserting large fragments of DNA, from 100–1000 kb, the inserted sequences can be cloned and physically mapped using a process called chromosome walking. This is the process that was initially used for the Human Genome Project, however due to stability issues, YACs were abandoned for the use of bacterial artificial chromosome
Synthetic biology (SynBio) is a multidisciplinary field of science that focuses on living systems and organisms, and it applies engineering principles to develop new biological parts, devices, and systems or to redesign existing systems found in nature.
Condensins are large protein complexes that play a central role in chromosome assembly and segregation during mitosis and meiosis. Their subunits were originally identified as major components of mitotic chromosomes assembled in Xenopus egg extracts.
Heteroplasmy is the presence of more than one type of organellar genome within a cell or individual. It is an important factor in considering the severity of mitochondrial diseases. Because most eukaryotic cells contain many hundreds of mitochondria with hundreds of copies of mitochondrial DNA, it is common for mutations to affect only some mitochondria, leaving most unaffected.
Komagataella is a methylotrophic yeast within the order Saccharomycetales. It was found in the 1960s as Pichia pastoris, with its feature of using methanol as a source of carbon and energy. In 1995, P. pastoris was reassigned into the sole representative of genus Komagataella, becoming Komagataella pastoris. Later studies have further distinguished new species in this genus, resulting in a total of 7 recognized species. It is not uncommon to see the old name still in use, as of 2023; in less formal use, the yeast may confusingly be referred to as pichia.
Oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs), also known as oligodendrocyte precursor cells, NG2-glia, O2A cells, or polydendrocytes, are a subtype of glia in the central nervous system named for their essential role as precursors to oligodendrocytes. They are typically identified in the human by co-expression of PDGFRA and CSPG4.
Intraflagellar transport (IFT) is a bidirectional motility along axoneme microtubules that is essential for the formation (ciliogenesis) and maintenance of most eukaryotic cilia and flagella. It is thought to be required to build all cilia that assemble within a membrane projection from the cell surface. Plasmodium falciparum cilia and the sperm flagella of Drosophila are examples of cilia that assemble in the cytoplasm and do not require IFT. The process of IFT involves movement of large protein complexes called IFT particles or trains from the cell body to the ciliary tip and followed by their return to the cell body. The outward or anterograde movement is powered by kinesin-2 while the inward or retrograde movement is powered by cytoplasmic dynein 2/1b. The IFT particles are composed of about 20 proteins organized in two subcomplexes called complex A and B.
Recombineering is a genetic and molecular biology technique based on homologous recombination systems, as opposed to the older/more common method of using restriction enzymes and ligases to combine DNA sequences in a specified order. Recombineering is widely used for bacterial genetics, in the generation of target vectors for making a conditional mouse knockout, and for modifying DNA of any source often contained on a bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC), among other applications.
Mycoplasma laboratorium or Synthia refers to a synthetic strain of bacterium. The project to build the new bacterium has evolved since its inception. Initially the goal was to identify a minimal set of genes that are required to sustain life from the genome of Mycoplasma genitalium, and rebuild these genes synthetically to create a "new" organism. Mycoplasma genitalium was originally chosen as the basis for this project because at the time it had the smallest number of genes of all organisms analyzed. Later, the focus switched to Mycoplasma mycoides and took a more trial-and-error approach.
Gail Roberta Martin is an American biologist. She is professor emerita in the Department of Anatomy, University of California, San Francisco. She is known for her pioneering work on the isolation of pluripotent stem cells from normal embryos, for which she coined the term ‘embryonic stem cells’. She is also widely recognized for her work on the function of Fibroblast Growth Factors (FGFs) and their negative regulators in vertebrate organogenesis. She and her colleagues also made valuable contributions to gene targeting technology.
A HEAT repeat is a protein tandem repeat structural motif composed of two alpha helices linked by a short loop. HEAT repeats can form alpha solenoids, a type of solenoid protein domain found in a number of cytoplasmic proteins. The name "HEAT" is an acronym for four proteins in which this repeat structure is found: Huntingtin, elongation factor 3 (EF3), protein phosphatase 2A (PP2A), and the yeast kinase TOR1. HEAT repeats form extended superhelical structures which are often involved in intracellular transport; they are structurally related to armadillo repeats. The nuclear transport protein importin beta contains 19 HEAT repeats.
Genetically modified fish are organisms from the taxonomic clade which includes the classes Agnatha, Chondrichthyes and Osteichthyes whose genetic material (DNA) has been altered using genetic engineering techniques. In most cases, the aim is to introduce a new trait to the fish which does not occur naturally in the species, i.e. transgenesis.
Stuart C. Sealfon is an American neurologist who studies the mechanisms of both the therapeutic and adverse effects of drugs. He was an early adopter of the use of massively parallel qPCR and fluorescent in situ hybridization to characterize cell response state and his research accomplishments have included the identification of the primary structure of the gonadotropin-releasing hormone receptor, finding new signaling pathways activated by drugs for Parkinson's disease, elucidating the mechanism of action of hallucinogens and finding a new brain receptor complex implicated in schizophrenia as a novel target for antipsychotics.
Michael B. Elowitz is a biologist and professor of Biology, Bioengineering, and Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology, and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2007 he was the recipient of the Genius grant, better known as the MacArthur Fellows Program for the design of a synthetic gene regulatory network, the Repressilator, which helped initiate the field of synthetic biology. He was the first to show how inherently random effects, or 'noise', in gene expression could be detected and quantified in living cells, leading to a growing recognition of the many roles that noise plays in living cells. His work in Synthetic Biology and Noise represent two foundations of the field of Systems Biology. Since then, his laboratory has contributed to the development of synthetic biological circuits that perform a range of functions inside cells, and revealed biological circuit design principles underlying epigenetic memory, cell fate control, cell-cell communication, and multicellular behaviors.
Synthetic biological circuits are an application of synthetic biology where biological parts inside a cell are designed to perform logical functions mimicking those observed in electronic circuits. The applications range from simply inducing production to adding a measurable element, like GFP, to an existing natural biological circuit, to implementing completely new systems of many parts.
Bovine seminal RNase (BS-RNase) is a member of the ribonuclease superfamily produced by the bovine seminal vesicles. This enzyme can not be differentiated from its members distinctly since there are more features that this enzyme shares with its family members than features that it possess alone. The research on the question of how new functions arrive in proteins in evolution led the scientists to find an uncommon consequence for a usual biological event called gene conversion in the case of the ribonuclease (RNase) protein family. The most well-known member of this family, RNase A, is expressed in the pancreas of oxen. It serves to digest RNA in intestine, and evolved from bacteria fermenting in the stomach of the first ox. The homologous RNase, called seminal RNase, differs from RNase A by 23 amino acids and is expressed in seminal plasma in the concentration of 1-1.5 mg/ml, which constitutes more than 3% of the fluid protein content. Bovine seminal ribonuclease (BS-RNase) is a homologue of RNase A with specific antitumor activity.
Genome-wide CRISPR-Cas9 knockout screens aim to elucidate the relationship between genotype and phenotype by ablating gene expression on a genome-wide scale and studying the resulting phenotypic alterations. The approach utilises the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system, coupled with libraries of single guide RNAs (sgRNAs), which are designed to target every gene in the genome. Over recent years, the genome-wide CRISPR screen has emerged as a powerful tool for performing large-scale loss-of-function screens, with low noise, high knockout efficiency and minimal off-target effects.
Xenopus egg extract is a lysate that is prepared by crushing the eggs of the African clawed frog Xenopus laevis. It offers a powerful cell-free system for studying various cell biological processes, including cell cycle progression, nuclear transport, DNA replication and chromosome segregation. It is also called Xenopus egg cell-free system or Xenopus egg cell-free extract.
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