Anik Debnath has developed a state-of-the-art synthetic biology platform with machine-learning capabilities in order to design new genetics that optimize drug production in microbiome bacteria. He has implemented this platform to reprogram bacteria native to the female genital tract to deliver antivirals as a “probiotic vaccine” for HIV, achieving drug yields up to 1000 x higher than previous efforts. For this work, he was a finalist in the Harvard Presidential Innovation Challenge, a semifinalist in MIT 100K Launch, a semifinalist in Science2Startup, and a recipient of the Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator Award.

Anik is currently a James Mills Peirce Graduate Fellow in George Church’s Lab at the Harvard Medical School Department of Genetics, with a focus on the fields of the microbiome, synthetic biology, and immunology. He holds a B.S. in Applied Physics from the Caltech, where he focused on bioinformatics and biophysics.