Engineering yeast’s secretion pathway offers a powerful strategy to enhance the manufacturing of valuable proteins, enzymes, and biopharmaceuticals. By optimizing protein folding, vesicle trafficking, and export mechanisms within yeast cells, researchers can significantly increase secretion efficiency and product yield. Advances in genetic engineering and systems biology enable precise pathway modifications, reducing intracellular bottlenecks. These improvements position yeast as a scalable, cost-effective platform for industrial biotechnology and sustainable biomanufacturing.

Recombinant insulin has an inherent instability that drives fibrillation, aggregation, and reliance on hexamer formulations. We address this at the molecular level through structure-guided design, creating an ultra-stable insulin analog that resists fibril formation and maintains stability under heat and stress. This enables a monomeric, fast-acting, and highly controllable insulin, establishing a new foundation for improved pharmacokinetics and next-generation insulin therapies.

Accurate identification and supply of drug metabolites remain persistent bottlenecks in pharmaceutical development, particularly when synthetically intractable or cost prohibitive. Human cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes, the primary catalysts of oxidative drug metabolism, are notoriously difficult to express in conventional recombinant systems. We have adapted our Leishmania tarentolae-based CYP expression platform for bioreactor culture, enabling scalable production of catalytically active, full-length human CYP enzymes as whole-cell biocatalysts that convert parent drugs directly into authentic human metabolites. We will discuss the development and scale-up of this system and its applications for metabolite standard generation, drug metabolism and toxicology studies, and biotransformation screening.

Growth factors and cytokines are commonly used media reagents in cell culture, therapies, and research with a market valued at $740M. Many of these proteins are manufactured in E. coli as inclusion bodies which require solubilization and refolding. Opera Bioscience has developed the type 3 secretion system (T3SS) in a novel bacterial expression platform for single-step secretion of soluble heterologous proteins, achieving up to 90% purity before purification. Opera’s technology enables efficient and scalable fermentation to manufacture proteins for reagents, enzymes, and therapeutics. We will present Opera’s progress on the secretion and production of growth factors and cytokines.

The expansive genetic toolkit for Drosophila melanogaster allows for stable expression of bioactive proteins. Illustrated through multiple case studies, we will discuss genetic strategies on optimizing protein expression, including tissue-specific and inducible expression. This novel approach has the potential to overcome recombinant protein expression difficulties associated with conventional systems.

Next-generation insect cell lines are emerging as versatile platforms for recombinant protein and vaccine production. This presentation highlights how integrative functional genomics—including single-cell transcriptomics, ATAC-seq, and regulatory network modeling—can decode cellular heterogeneity, identify productivity-associated pathways, and guide rational engineering of expression systems. By linking omics-derived insights with cell line development, we outline strategies to improve stability, scalability, and performance, positioning insect platforms as competitive and customizable solutions for next-generation biomanufacturing.

Cell-free protein synthesis unlocks high-throughput biologics discovery. By decoupling cell growth from protein production, it enables rapid expression using stable extracts. Unlike cell-based systems, it offers control over reaction conditions, efficient incorporation of non-natural amino acids, and production of molecules from diverse scaffolds—via a single extract. This cutting-edge platform is fully scalable from benchtop to commercial manufacturing, providing a seamless platform from discovery to commercialization with speed as the focus.

Recombinant production of disulfide rich proteins in E. coli is hindered by host redox imbalance, misfolding and aggregation. In our study, we combined untargeted metabolomics of two E. coli strains (BL21 (DE3) and SHuffle) with manipulation of fusion tags (thioredoxin) and induction temperature to identify metabolic signatures associated with soluble vs insoluble expression. Our findings reveal actionable metabolome based indicators of host performance and provide a roadmap for rational expression platform design.

Biopharming harnesses plants as an emerging platform for recombinant protein production, offering a promising alternative to traditional expression systems. I will introduce our Nicotiana benthamiana-based expression system and the pioneering work of Australia’s first biopharming initiative. Our aim was to develop a plant-based biologic to combat parasitic worms in livestock. This presentation encapsulates a three-year project of developing, scaling, and testing a plant-based recombinant protein in clinical studies from start to finish. Selected strategies for large-scale plant growth, infiltration methods, and downstream processing will be explored in-depth to show how we achieved gram-scale production of our target protein.

This Young/Early Career Scientist Meet-Up provides a relaxed setting to connect new entrants to the field to one another, where they can build their professional networks, gain constructive feedback on research, seek out mentors and advisors, and reduce isolation in specialized fields.

• ​Get to know fellow peers and colleagues
• Make connections and network with established leaders in the field
• Build professional networks
• Encourage cross-discipline collaboration
• Develop potential mentor-mentee relationship