Engineering Biology
Health & Medicine Challenge:

Promote equitable access to healthcare, patient representation in research, democratization of medicine, and the development of personalized medicines.

Develop patient-specific testbeds for drug treatments to support patient representation and personalized medicine.

Engineering Biology Objectives & Technical Achievements

Develop induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived organoids as personalized models.

Engineering DNA Biomolecular Engineering Host Engineering Data Science

Deliver and stabilize the expression of synthetic DNA in iPSCs.

Use nucleases to efficiently edit very small numbers of cells with minimal error.

Identify and characterize differences in gene expression profiles between human primary tissues and iPSC-derived tissues.

Develop nanocarriers to efficiently deliver macromolecules into small numbers of cells.

Develop patient-specific organ-on-a-chip devices to model individual patient response to drug treatments across organ systems.

Develop minimally-invasive methods to collect and culture useful cells.

Establish databases of genetic and metabolic expression and activity profiles of iPSCs and iPSC-derived tissues.

Personalize medical treatments to human subpopulations and/or individuals.1Dehingia, M., Adak, A., & Khan, M. R. (2019). Ethnicity-Influenced Microbiota: A Future Healthcare Perspective. Trends in Microbiology, 27(3), 191–193. View publication.
Molteni, M. (2019, March 10). 23andMe’s New Diabetes Test Has Experts Asking Who It’s For | WIRED.
Hooker, S. E., Woods-Burnham, L., Bathina, M., Lloyd, S. M., Gorjala, P., Mitra, R., … Kittles, R. (2019). Genetic ancestry analysis reveals misclassification of commonly used cancer cell lines. Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. View publication.

Engineering DNA Biomolecular Engineering Host Engineering Data Science

Develop fast, high-fidelity, on-demand synthesis of large fragments of customized DNA and RNA for clinical use.

Develop macromolecules and gene circuits that sense and report the local cellular or tissue environment.

Develop living therapeutic cells that switch phenotypes in response to the local tissue environment.

Develop allergen-free platforms and cells for drug production.

Model variants and alleles present in the human population to better understand and mitigate health challenges.

Identify useful semi-generalizable (familial or population-wide) features to help accelerate diagnoses and the design of treatment regimes.

Footnotes

  1. Dehingia, M., Adak, A., & Khan, M. R. (2019). Ethnicity-Influenced Microbiota: A Future Healthcare Perspective. Trends in Microbiology, 27(3), 191–193. View publication.
    Molteni, M. (2019, March 10). 23andMe’s New Diabetes Test Has Experts Asking Who It’s For | WIRED.
    Hooker, S. E., Woods-Burnham, L., Bathina, M., Lloyd, S. M., Gorjala, P., Mitra, R., … Kittles, R. (2019). Genetic ancestry analysis reveals misclassification of commonly used cancer cell lines. Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & PreventionView publication.
Last updated: June 19, 2019 Back