Researcher Profile Form First National Pediatric Brain Tumor Research Meeting March 9, 2025 - Jerusalem
Researcher: Dr. Nir Skalaka
Current Role & Affiliation
Title/Position: Chief Scientific Officer (CSO), and acting CEO at Circuit-Bio LTD
Institution: at Circuit-Bio LTD
Email: nirskalka@gmail.com
Phone: 0525050265
Nir Skalka is the CSO and CEO of Circuit-Bio - a pre-clinical synthetic biology company developing an innovative unique platform of logical gene circuits for cancer immunotherapy.
Research Focus
Synthetic gene circuits is a branch in synthetic biology research field, aimed to selectively engineer and insert genes into targeted living cells to perform desirable, tunable and controlled logical functions. This approach enables reprogramming living organism cells to perform a broad range of new functions, such as cellular responses to changing environmental conditions, protein production and even operate a “kill switch” mechanism (suicide gene).The Company’s platform focuses on generating gene circuits able to locally produce a combination of multiple immune-stimulating proteins (immunomodulators) exclusively expressed in targeted tumor cells. Thus, the circuit selectively converts cancer cells into ‘Trojan horses’ utilized as an anti-tumor resource, that triggers a robust long-term anti-tumoral immune response. The immunomodulators’ output is tightly controlled by two de novo synthetic cancer-specific promoters.
Current Projects Related to Pediatric Brain Tumors
The current focus of the company is on adult cancers, however use of the company’s technology in pediatric brain tumors is under evaluation.
What You Can Offer Potential Collaborators
Evaluation of the use of the company’s technology as part of a collaborative study
Keywords
Synthetic gene circuits, Immunotherapy, targeted therapy
Recent Relevant Publications Re Circuit-Bio technology
1. Weinstein-Marom H, et.al. Genetic Modification of Tumor-Infiltrating Lymphocytes, Peripheral T Cells, and T-Cell Model Cell Lines.Methods Mol Biol. 2024;2748:167-186.
2. Katzman C, et.al. Modeling SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Mice Using Lentiviral hACE2 Vectors Infers Two Modes of Immune Responses to SARS-CoV-2 Infection. Viruses. 2021 Dec 21;14(1):11.
3. He J, et.al. Synthetic Circuit-Driven Expression of Heterologous Enzymes for Disease Detection.ACS Synth Biol. 2021 Sep 17;10(9):2231-2242.
Brief Bio
Dr. Skalka holds a Ph.D. from the Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University with a focus on CRC and the Wnt signal. He has extensive experience in molecular biology and biochemistry methods, cancer research, immunology and in vitro and in vivo mouse cancer models. Before establishing Circuit-Bio, Dr. Skalka held various positions such as R&D scientist at Diabest Botanical Drugs, a drug development company for type 2 diabetes, and head of the immune-oncology team at Aummune (A spin-off from Augmanity Nano), a personalized medicine drug discovers company for cancer immunotherapy.
