Mermod Nicolas

Biography

Nicolas Mermod is Professor of Biotechnology at the Faculty of Biology and Medicine of the University of Lausanne, and a co-founder of Selexis SA, a biotech company. Nic completed his PhD at the University of Geneva in environmental biotechnology, followed by post-doctoral studies at the University of California at Berkley, USA, with Professor Robert Tjian. Nic then joined the University of Lausanne as an Assistant Professor, to become full Professor and the director of the Institute of Biotechnology. Nic’s Laboratory for Molecular Biotechnology at EPFL, which gained recognition in the field of gene expression in eukaryotic cells by publishing over 100 papers in peer reviewed renowned journals. Besides his scientific publications, Nic has authored a number of patents on epigenetic regulatory elements and gene transfer.

Research Interest

Epigenetic regulatory DNA elements can be added to expression vectors to increase transgene genomic integration, to dampen silencing, and to provide overall a more reliable expression in cultured mammalian cells. Nevertheless, expression remains variable from one cell clone to the next. We have sequenced the genomes of CHO cell clones expressing recombinant proteins, yielding information on the molecular mechanisms that allowed the genomic integration of the plasmid vectors. This provided an approach to transiently silence unwanted recombination pathways, so as to favor a microhomology-based recombination mechanism that mediates integration into expression-permissive genomic loci. When combined to MAR epigenetic regulatory elements, this provides much more predictable and homogeneous levels of transgene expression in polyclonal cell populations expressing a gene of interest.