Shannon J. Sirk, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she also serves as the Associate Director of the Illinois Microbial Systems Initiative. Research in the Sirk Lab focuses on engineering human and animal commensal bacterial species to function as on-site production and delivery vehicles for targeted biological therapeutics, in an effort to reduce cost and increase accessibility for these highly impactful drugs. Current work in the group aims to engineer gut and respiratory microbial species to produce and secrete small neutralizing antibody fragments from within their native physiological niches. Further optimization is focused on engineering the antibody fragments themselves via genetically-encoded modifications to enhance their therapeutic capacity.
Dr. Sirk received her AB in Biology from Occidental College and her Ph.D. in Molecular and Medical Pharmacology from UCLA. Her doctoral studies focused on engineering antibody fragments for targeted tumor imaging using positron emission tomography. Her postdoctoral training began at Scripps Research, where she continued to work with engineered antibodies while also performing detailed protein engineering studies to generate site-specific nucleases and recombinases for targeted genome modifications, in the era immediately prior to the introduction of CRISPR-based gene editing technology. She then pursued further postdoctoral training at Stanford University where she first began to explore the world of commensal microbes by studying the role that gut bacteria play in the activation of drug-like dietary molecules.