Andrew Mendelsohn

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Positions
President, Research Director, and Professor

 

 

 

Research
Dr. Mendelsohn’s  current research in regenerative, systems, and synthetic biology spans a broad range of interests from understanding the basic mechanisms that underlie aging, to characterizing the differences between regenerative capabilities in humans and “immortal” organisms like planaria that have essentially unlimited ability to regenerate their body, due to the presence of somatic pluripotent stem cells to the development of chassis (organism) independent standardized parts for synthetic biology. We seek to overcome aging by using synthetic and computational biology to engineer enhanced regeneration and rejuvenation. Development of appropriate dynamic computer simulations of aging biological systems is ongoing. At the heart of our approach is the creation and insertion of new biological programs into cells to augment pre-existing incomplete regeneration mechanisms.

Biography
Dr. Andrew Mendelsohn has been deeply interested in the biology of aging for many years. He founded the 501(c)(3) non-profit Regenerative Sciences Institute in 1994 to pursue research at the interface of aging, regeneration, and what is now called synthetic biology.  He is an early proponent of synthetic biology, before the field was officially named and recognized, having the engineereed autolysing cell-penetrating bacteria for in-vivo gene transfer to mammalian cells in 1989-1990 and developing the central idea for protein-protein based logic circuits in yeast in 1997 in an early synthetic biology paper.

Education
BA, biophysics, University of Pennsylvania
PhD, molecular cell biology and biochemistry, Brown University

Publications

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