Presenting on “Synthetic biology for human health: RNA-compatible circuits and machine-guided humanization”.

Xiaojing Gao, PhD, assistant professor of chemical engineering at Stanford University, will speak on Thursday, August 27, 2026 at 10 am Central Time in Whitaker 218.

Abstract: How do we design biological systems as “smart medicine” that sense patients’ states, process the information, and respond accordingly? To realize this vision, we engineer towards a “simple” goal: producing specific proteins in the right cells at the right time, which incidentally is also useful for genetically dissecting complex systems such as neural circuits. We focus on controllers compatible with RNA delivery, because they can leverage the superior safety of mRNA vectors compared to more conventional DNA vectors, and offer additional benefits such as robust performance and compact delivery. I will share how we continue to develop a protease platform to program intercellular communications, and how we co-opt RNA editing to create sensors for transcript markers that represent cell types/states and ligands that represent extracellular environments. I will also share our attempt at embracing AI/ML tools to address key obstacles we encountered during protein engineering, especially for minimizing the immunogenic risk of our engineered components.