High Flyers: Gold medal for the IONIS group at the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Competition

The IONIS group is very proud to announce that a team composed of students and staff from Sup’Biotech and five other IONIS schools have once again brought home a gold medal from this year’s iGEM competition. Their success comes after more than ten months of painstaking collaborative research and design. The winning entry, named Quantifly, was awarded gold by the iGEM jury this week, as well as being nominated for three separate awards in the overgrad category: Best Environment Project, Best Presentation and Best Applied design.

Quantifly is a highly innovative concept, relying on a marriage between modern aeronautics and biotechnological excellence to create a drone capable of detecting common pollutants in the air that we breathe. It seeks to address an important and increasingly dangerous problem of modern urban life, that of reduced air quality, by using a biosensor to detect Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) in our environment. The challenge for the team was to design and build a biosensor that quickly and efficiently identified such pollutants, and to house this safely within a drone. The Quantifly team solved the problem of detection by using bacteria that respond to bioluminescence, created by the presence of VOCs. The next challenge was to build Quantifly itself, the airborne mobile detection platform which contains the bacteria. The finished prototype is shown here, surrounded by the successful team.

The IONIS team competed with 279 other teams from all over the world to bring home the gold: nations represented at this year’s competition include, among others, The United States, Canada, Chile, Kazakhstan, Japan, South Korea, Egypt, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, Germany, France, and Australia.