Computational Life Sciences and Synthetic Biology
Group leader
Specific themes and goals
- Application of modern communication theory to decode functional information encoded in genomes across the domains of life.
- Predict and computationally design thermostability of proteins and enzymes, and specifically the rational design of therapeutically important biologics.
- Analysis of infectious diseases emergence and epidemiology from a synthetic biology standpoint. For example, the investigation of the original outbreak and of superspreader events of COVID-19.
Recent highlights and impact
- Discussed how the historically unprecedented COVID-19 mass vaccination campaign could be epidemiologically, pharmacologically and biologically understood and evaluated. This contribution reviewed the first mass vaccination campaign with the new type of synthetic nucleic acid and virus vector-based vaccines that took place in Europe (initially, the United Kingdom), beginning in December 2020.
- Analyzed how short-term vaccine effectiveness (the potential to reduce disease outcome in the vaccinated population relative to the unvaccinated) could be measured for COVID-19 vaccines given that SARS-CoV-2 transmission is highly volatile and dominated by superspreader events.
- Asked how we can even begin to understand the risks and consequences of digitization and automation that are both advancing and challenging our civilization.
- Explored what type of global existential risks there are, and whether we have a sufficient level of understanding and control over the risks, such as genetic engineering, that lie before us in the 2020s.
Selected publications
- Lisewski AM. Effectiveness of England’s initial vaccine roll out. The British Medical Journal, 373:n1201, 13 May 2021.
- Lisewski AM. Interim estimates in null models of COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness. International Journal of Infectious Diseases, 106:169-170, 18 Mar 2021.
- Lisewski AM. Pre-pandemic artificial MERS analog of polyfunctional SARS-CoV-2 S1/S2 furin cleavage site domain is unique among betacoronaviruses Zenodo 26 December 2022 (ResearchSquare)
- Lisewski AM. Evidence for yeast artificial synthesis in SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV-1 genomic sequences. f1000Research 2022, 10:912