An ideal cancer therapeutic should be able to selectively target the activity of key cellular pathways that support or drive growth in cancer cells. It should also elicit downstream actions, such as recruiting T cells for cancer cell killing. Since most of the signaling inside cells is facilitated by proteins, a promising new direction for cancer therapy involves building modular and programmable circuits inside living cells using lab-designed proteins. Dr. Chen aims to combine cutting-edge methods in computational protein design and synthetic biology to build a protein-based circuit that can sense multiple inputs (e.g., cancer biomarkers) and carry out a diverse set of functions (e.g., cancer cell killing) based on pre-programmed instructions.
