Mutans Team from Unipd Wins iGEM Gold Medal in Paris
10.11.2025
Mutans, the multidisciplinary group of students representing the University of Padua in the international iGEM competition, the world's largest dedicated to synthetic biology, has won the gold medal this year in Paris with a project studying Progeria.
The Mutans team is composed of students from various degrees programs (Biotechnology, Molecular Biology, Biomedical Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Chemistry) with the aim of creating a collaborative space to put the knowledge acquired in the classroom into practice and develop concrete solutions to real-world problems through the use of synthetic biology.
This year, Mutans decided to dedicate their project to Progeria, a rare but particularly significant disease for the University of Padua due to the late Sammy Basso. The pathology is caused by a point mutation that leads to the production of progerin, a malformed protein that accumulates associated with the nuclear membrane of cells.
"The project aims to develop a protein tool capable of promoting the degradation of this protein," explains the research team. "While aware that the path to a possible cure is still long, in the laboratory we have obtained promising results, demonstrating the actual degradation of progerin thanks to the tool we developed."
This achievement represents an important step forward in research and a great satisfaction for the entire group.
