Engineering Biology
Health & Medicine Challenge:

Eradicate existing and emerging infectious diseases.

Diagnose and treat viral infections.

Engineering Biology Objectives & Technical Achievements

Develop rapid, reliable diagnostics to detect viral infections.

Engineering DNA Biomolecular Engineering Host Engineering Data Science

Rapid, high-fidelity DNA synthesis for development and production of sensing technologies.

Gene editing technologies for building cell-based sensors.

Sensitive and specific molecular sensing technologies, such as molecular probes or DNA amplification.

Cell-expressed reporters for infection.

Synthetic epigenetic silencing of viral DNA.

Point-of-care (POC) and/or microfluidic systems for automating patient sample preparation.

Cheap and fast sequencing of viral infection markers and patient susceptibility biomarkers.

Develop tools to treat viral infections.

Engineering DNA Biomolecular Engineering Host Engineering Data Science

New gene editing tools to precisely neutralize or excise viral sequences from host genomes.

Scaled-up synthesis of high quality DNA encoding anti-viral gene circuits.

Rapid design and synthesis of customized, targeted endonucleases for inhibiting viral replication.

Synthetic epigenetic silencing of viral DNA.

Development of cell and tissue models to screen and test anti-viral interventions in situ.

Systems biology approaches to identifying critical molecular weaknesses in viral function as drug targets.

Simulations to predict pace and breadth of epidemics and impact of molecular interventions.

Last updated: June 19, 2019 Back