On October 31, the undergraduate team NKU-CHINA from the College of Life Sciences at Nankai University claimed a gold medal at the 2025 International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Grand Jamboree, held in Paris. It is the fourth time that students from the college secured top honors at the prestigious competition.

As the most influential international event in synthetic biology, iGEM fosters interdisciplinary collaboration among young scientists to address global challenges, drawing participation from universities worldwide each year. This year’s Grand Jamboree in Paris featured over 400 teams and more than 5,000 participants.

The NKU-CHINA team’s project, “An Active Engineered Living Therapy (ELT) Targeting Neuroinflammation Systematically Designed Through the Gut-Brain Axis System”, addresses key challenges in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) treatment, including incomplete understanding of neuroinflammatory mechanisms and limitations of single-biomarker approaches. The team developed a precision regulatory strategy using an AND-gate logic circuit that responds simultaneously to two AD-related intestinal biomarkers: reactive oxygen species (ROS) and trimethylamine (TMA). Through multi-scale computational modeling, the dry-lab team systematically simulated and optimized the circuit’s response threshold, dynamic behavior, and pharmacokinetic parameters. This design overcomes pharmacodynamic limitations of traditional methods that rely on distant brain biomarkers, enabling intelligent disease recognition and response locally in the gut. The team’s “sense-compute-actuate” framework offers a potential platform technology for innovative prevention and treatment strategies for AD and other diseases.

The team was led by Professor Yu Qilin from the College of Life Sciences, with additional guidance from several faculty members in the Department of Microbiology. The 26-member team included two graduate students, four seniors, 13 juniors, and three sophomores. Their participation in the competition in France was strongly supported by the Top-notch Program under the Boling College at Nankai University.

（Edited and translated by Nankai News Team.)