Synthetic biology platforms for biomedical applications

Our lab is dedicated to engineering synthetic gene circuits that precisely regulate and target specific cell states, ensuring maximal efficacy while minimizing off-target effects. Our research spans across fundamental biological studies, cancer immunotherapy, adoptive cell therapies, antiviral vaccines, and more, with a strong emphasis on developing orthogonal biological systems for diverse biomedical applications. This talk will focus on two main platforms we developed:
Synthetic Promoters with Enhanced Cell-State Specificity (SPECS): Identifying cell-state specific promoters is crucial for both basic and applied research but remains challenging. To address this, we developed a high-throughput synthetic promoter engineering and screening platform capable of generating compact promoters with enhanced specificity for virtually any cell state, without requiring prior gene regulation data. This platform has been successfully applied to discover SPECS for a wide array of normal and disease cell states, such as SPECS for chemotherapy-resistant cancer cells and primary immune cells.
Scalable Synthetic Gene Circuits: We develop scalable platforms that perform complex logic operations, paving the way for new therapeutic approaches and biotechnological innovations. We recently developed circuits that execute various multi-input logic gates and computational operations.