Special SFB 1032 Seminar - Gábor Balázsi, Ph.D.
Henry Laufer Professor, The Louis and Beatrice Laufer Center for Physical & Quantitative Biology Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Stony Brook University
19.02.2024 17:00 – 18:00
Location: Kleiner Physiksaal N020, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz, 1
Title: "Synthetic Cancer Biology"
Abstract: Synthetic biology is a relatively new field that designs and implements artificial biological systems for predefined purposes. For example, genes and promoters have been assembled into synthetic gene circuits that sense and respond to stimuli, oscillate, pulse, switch, or count. My lab has developed various synthetic gene circuits to tune the expression of arbitrary proteins in cell populations, with a capability of controlling the mean and variance (noise) of protein level distributions. Here I will illustrate how specific genome modifications facilitate the stable, safe, repeatable insertion of such synthetic gene circuits into well-expressed mammalian chromosomal loci. By controlling the expression of cancer-related proteins, we obtain engineered cellular model systems that offer new ways to address outstanding problems in cancer biology, such as: (1) How cellular heterogeneity affects the evolution of drug resistance? (2) How drug resistance develops and can be tackled? (3) How metastatic cell behaviors depend on metastasis regulator levels? Overall, synthetic biology paves the road towards a more quantitative cancer biology, with some unexpected therapeutic implications.