The project is dedicated to rational design and engineering of mammalian cells augmented with complex functionalities, for applications in non-medical biotechnology.
The two application areas include rational forward design of bioproducing mammalian cell lines, and the development of sentinel (reporter) cells for highly-informative drug discovery assays. In the former, we combine the laters tools of genetic engineering such as synthetic biology and automation, with the recent genome editing approaches and rational in situ control of the bioproduction process on a single cell level, to achieve end-to-end workflow for biomanufacturing cells without the need for screening. In the latter project, we harness the power of biomolecular computing to engineerer reporter cells that detect multiple drug effects in parallel. This dramatically increases the information content of a cell-based drug screening assay without reducing the throughput.