Marc Güell is an ICREA Research Professor, working at Pompeu Fabra University. His work includes several synthetic biology breakthroughs (radically recoded genome, PERVs-free pigs, gene writing, skin microbiome engineering) that have produced important impact (>21,900 citations, 4 companies developing therapies, patents licensed to leading companies) and he is currently developing new principles for biological engineering and synthetic evolution. He is member of Academia Joven de España. He has been recognized as 'Highly Cited Researcher' (2019); EMBO Young investigator (2021); and with the National Research Award to the young talent (2018), the August Pi i Sunyer Award (2021) and the National Research Award Ángela Ruiz Robles (2022).
Research interests
My goal is to leverage biology to create new scientific principles and technologies to engineer genomes and metagenomes, and push biological engineering to the next level. Read and write technologies have been advancing at breathtaking pace. This has enabled us to understand and engineer life using its genuine language: DNA.
Very recently, a great ally came to provide intelligence to this unique molecular hardware. AI is approaching a very remarkable understanding of life language and can produce new synthetic proteins. Directed evolution is capable of fast generation of genotypes and fast selection of phenotypes. However, current methods have no software to orient evolutionary trajectories. Coupling this biological hardware with AI massively accelerates the evolution rate of protein function. Not only we can read and write DNA, but we are starting to design synthetic parts de novo. This has been a transformative development for my research goals.
Selected publications
– Oficina Nacional de Prospectiva y Estrategia del Bogierno de España. HispanIA 2040: Como la inteligencia artificial mejorará nuestro futuro. Madrid, 2025.
– Nevot G, Santos-Moreno J, Campamà-Sanz N, Toloza L, Parra-Cid C, Jansen PAM, Barbier I, Ledesma-Amaro R, van den Bogaard EH & Guell M 2025, ‘Synthetically programmed antioxidant delivery by a domesticated skin commensal‘, Cell systems, 16 – 2 – 101169.
– Rea, A et al. 2025, ‘Enhancing human NK cell antitumor function by knocking out SMAD4 to counteract TGFβ and activin A suppression‘, Nature immunology, 26 – 4 .
– Fu CB, Niskanen EA, Wei GH, Yang ZR, Sanvicente-García M, Güell M & Cheng L 2025, ‘k-mer manifold approximation and projection for visualizing DNA sequences‘, Genome research, 35 – 5 – 1234 – 1246.
– Nevot G, Cros MP, Toloza L, Campamà-Sanz N, Artigues-Lleixà M, Aguilera L & Güell M 2025, ‘Engineered Marine Biofilms for Ocean Environment Monitoring‘, Acs synthetic biology, 14 – 7 – 2797 – 2809.
– Nevot G, Güell M & Santos-Moreno J 2025, ‘Critical Analysis of Preprints and Inquiry-Based Lessons Improve the Synthetic Biology Learning Experience‘, Acs synthetic biology, 14 – 8 – 2878 – 2884.
Selected research activities
- Represented Barcelona’s scientific community in the Feria Internacional del Libro (FIL) Barcelona
- Provided life sciences perspective in the report prepared by the Spanish Government of how AI will impact our future
- Thesian bio, a synbio lab spin off devoted to ultraspecific T cell targeting was born