Equipment Subproject Design-driven engineering of robust mammalian sense-and-respond functions

The long-term goal of this project is to enable the use of engineered cellular therapies to safely and effectively treat conditions ranging from cancer, to autoimmune disease, to those requiring regenerative medicine. Engineered cell therapies represent an exciting frontier in medicine, and early successes in the field of cancer treatment have demonstrated the transformative potential of this approach, enabling the treatment of patients for whom no existing therapy was effective. However, fully realizing the promise of engineered cell therapies will require technologies and tools that enable bioengineers to efficiently design, build, and evaluate customized cellular functions that meet specific clinical needs and requirements. While the field of mammalian synthetic biology has made impressive strides toward this goal, translating basic science to the clinic imposes a new set of design and engineering challenges, and meeting these will require new experimental “parts” for cell engineering, new computational tools, and new conceptual models.