Participant 8 | KI

KEMIJSKI INŠTITUT (KI)

NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF CHEMISTRY (KEMIJSKI INŠTITUT – KI)

The National Institute of Chemistry is a public research institution based in Ljubljana, Slovenia (https://www.ki.si/en/). With cutting-edge research, we are enriching the global treasury of knowledge by solving the most pressing challenges facing society including health, sustainable energy, climate change, a circular economy, and safe food. Our research goals push the boundaries of science and create new values. We successfully transfer knowledge to industry and, in the long term, support the role of science in the development of society. The KI houses a modern research infrastructure with state-of-the-art instruments that cover the range from atoms to in vivo experiments.

Prof. Roman Jerala is head of the Department of Synthetic Biology and Immunology (D12) at KI (https://www.ki.si/en/departments/d12-department-of-synthetic-biology-and-immunology/). The main research directions in this group are synthetic biology and molecular immunology. Synthetic biology combines the engineering approach with biological systems, aiming to introduce new properties into biological or biomimetic systems with potential applications and aiming to understand the function of complex biological systems by constructing them from the bottom up. The main research topics within synthetic biology include

1. Protein design, including modular and de novo/machine learning based
2. Engineering of mammalian cell signaling and information processing
3. Gene and cell therapy technologies.

Department members are strongly involved in the establishment and work of the Center for Technologies of Gene and Cell Therapy (CTGCT, https://ctgct.si/en/) funded by the EU Teaming project aiming to prepare technologies and therapeutic reagents for cancer immunotherapy and gene therapy. 

The role of KI group in T-FITNESS is to design synthetic regulators of therapeutic T cell exhaustion, based on tools of synthetic biology including protein design and genetic circuits.