Anush Chiappino-Pepe

Biochemical engineer/Synthetic biologist, Computational Biologist, Therapeutic seeker

I work at the interface of synthetic biology and computational biology,

decoding and expanding genome functions that introduce new chemistries in cells.

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I am a Research Associate (previously Swiss National Science Foundation and Specialist Postdoctoral Fellow) in the laboratory of George M. Church (Genetics department) at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

I am collaborating with the laboratories of Gregory Stephanopoulos (Chemical Engineering department) and Regina Barzilay (Computer Science department) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

News & Events

Academic service

Co-chairing SynBio track at Bioremediation Symposium in Boston, June 2025

I am co-developing a session on “Genetically Modified Microbes in Complex Environmental Microbiomes” for the 7th International Symposium...

Academic service

Panelist at 2024 AIChE WIC Breakfast

I am super happy to participate as a panelist at the AIChE WIC Breakfast networking session on “Holistic Mentorship: Getting what you...

Award

Rising Star at Princeton: award and talk

I am beyond thankful and honored to have been nominated and selected as a 2024 Rising Star in Biological Engineering at Princeton (...

Latest Publications

Preventing escape and malfunction of recoded cells due to tRNA base changes

We discovered that cells with an engineered genetic code modify or mutate its tRNAs to acquire external, fitness improving genes with a theoretically unreadable genetic code!

This finding allowed us to design a technology involving genetic code sensitive kill switches that prevents escape and malfunction of recoded cells due to tRNA base changes, while allowing incorporation of up to three distinct non-standard amino acids.
We reduced by 8 orders of magnitude the acquisition and spread of antibiotic resistance genes!

Image from Chiappino-Pepe et al (2024)