Building ‘Smart’ Cell-Based Therapies

April 21, 2014

(Nanowerk News) – A Northwestern synthetic biology team has created a new technology for modifying human cells to create programmable therapeutics that could travel the body and selectively target cancer and other sites of disease. Engineering cell-based, biological devices that monitor and modify human physiology is a promising frontier in clinical synthetic biology. However, no existing technology enabled bioengineers to build such devices that sense a patient’s physiological state and respond in a customized fashion.