Indian American Aditya Kunjapur Wins BioInnovation Institute & Science Prize for Innovation
- The assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Delaware was awarded the prize for his work toward building a better platform for possible future bacterial vaccines.
Indian American biomolecular engineer Aditya Kunjapur has won this year’s BioInnovation Institute & Science Prize for Innovation for his work toward building a better platform for possible future bacterial vaccines. The prize seeks to reward scientists who deliver research at the intersection of the life sciences and entrepreneurship. It includes publication of an essay about his research on bacterial vaccines in the April 5 issue of Science, a trip to Copenhagen for the awards ceremony, and a cash prize.
An assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Delaware, he directs an academic research program in synthetic biology, which is a field that seeks to make biology easier to engineer. The goal of his program is to expand the chemical repertoire of microbes to solve problems in human and environmental health. His research seeks to expand the breadth of molecules that microbes can make and where microbes can make them by programming cells to create and harness new-to-nature building blocks.
In his winning essay, Kunjapur writes that “our primary hypothesis is that engineering cells to access a broader chemical repertoire of building blocks can improve live bacterial vaccine efficacy.” One of the building blocks that caught his eye came from “previous research that modified a bacterial protein with a non-standard amino acid called para-nitro-L-phenylalanine (nitro-Phe),” the Science magazine said. “These nitrated proteins triggered sustained production of antibodies in mice, suggesting that the altered amino acid was making it easier for the immune system to access or recognize the bacterial protein.”
He co-founded Nitro Biosciences, Inc. with Butler to pursue the nitro-Phe technology. He said starting the company has made him think more about who is going to use the technology, and what kind of criteria and metrics they need to know so that it can be used successfully. “It’s a shame that a lot of academic work has the potential to make a difference in people’s lives, but academics aren’t ordinarily incentivized or trained to think about what the customer needs, who the customer is, and how do you advance the technology to the stage where it could be in the clinic,” Kunjapur said.
He received an undergraduate degree from the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After completing his postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, he started his laboratory in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Delaware in December 2018.