Alejandro Asensio Calavia

My name is Alejandro Asensio Clavia, PhD. Currently I’m a postdoctoral researcher working in the Laboratory of Biological Engineering at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Here, my research project is focused on engineering living organisms and bacteria as molecular recorders that can obtain information about pathophisiological conditions in the human gastrointestinal tract in a non-invasive way. We are able to retrieve later this genetic information and use it for developing personalized treatments.

Before joining my current lab, I was a predoctoral reasearcher at the Spanish National Center for Biotechnology, where my project was based on designing functional genetic modules that would be implemented into a safe bacterial chassis to create a programmable tumor-destroying biomachine. The developed technology was patented and ready to be implemented as an innovative cancer therapy in the near future.

Besides my experience in academia I’ve been always in close connection with industry, leading multiple collaborations with life sciences companies and having the oportunity to work in two different ones. One is the Boston-based startup Synlogic, where I was working in an in vivo-relevant cancer project related to my previous research. The other was the pharma company GSK, where I was developing in vitro cell culture hepatic models for drug testing, in order to reduce the number of animals these companies use to evaluate toxicity and accelerate the early stages of the drug discovery and development process.

My experience of more than 8 years in multiple life science labs and projects, together with my application-orinted mindset that my experience in industry has provided me make me a good candidate for becoming an expert and hopefully help emerging companies from Capital Cell in their development process with my scientific advise.