Lectures and seminars OnkPat Friday Seminar: Selection of DNA nanostructures for multivalent binding and cell targeted delivery

Host: Kasper Karlsson, Department of Oncology-Pathology

Abstract

In DNA nanotechnology synthetic DNA is designed so it assembles with high precision at the nanoscale. By adding proteins, chemical groups or drugs these structures can interact in specific ways with pathogens and cells for diagnostics and therapeutics. The fundamental challenge is that we often don’t know what we should design to achieve our goal. I will present our new approach where we make large libraries of diverse DNA structures and use selection experiments to search for structures that bind to pathogenic targets multivalently or are specifically taken up by cell or tumor types. 

BIography

Erik Benson is an Assistant professor at the department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology and a Scilifelab fellow leading a group since 2024 focused on combining DNA nanotechnology with selection and sequencing. Prior to this he did postdocs at the department of physics at the university of Oxford and the department of Gene technology at KTH following PhD at MBB in KI. 

Relevant publications

cONcat: Computational reconstruction of concatenated fragments from long Oxford Nanopore reads.
Petri AJ, Thi-Huyen Nguyen M, Rajwar A, Benson E, Sahlin K
PLoS One 2025 ;20(7):e0321246

A DNA molecular printer capable of programmable positioning and patterning in two dimensions.
Benson E, Marzo RC, Bath J, Turberfield AJ
Sci Robot 2022 Apr;7(65):eabn5459