Cancer can now be treated using living cells and synthetic biology, researchers find

Northwestern University synthetic biologist Joshua Leonard and his team have made a design-driven process which uses parts from a very different kind of toolkit to build complex genetic circuits for cellular engineering. Using living cells as therapies is of great use in medicines. Many patients have been cured using this new approach. This new discovery would help the bioengineers to make genetic programs using synthetic biology.

Computational modelling to identify genetic designs

These advances use the approaches of synthetic biology which is a growing field that uses tools and concepts from biology and engineering. Northwestern University is now using computational modelling to identify useful genetic designs before building them in the laboratory. The study which was published on February 19 in the journal Science Advances had dozens of genetic circuits that were designed and tested.

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Northwestern University's synthetic biologist Joshua Leonard said, “To engineer a cell, we first encode a desired biological function in a piece of DNA, and that DNA program is then delivered to a human cell to guide its execution of the desired function, such as activating a gene only in response to certain signals in the cell’s environment”. For this study, Joshua Leonard led a team of researchers from Northwestern University in collaboration with Neda Bagheri from the University of Washington. This discovery helps bioengineers to make genetic programs using synthetic biology. 

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Researchers used "toolkit" of genetic parts

The key feature of this approach is that it is intented to be readily adopted by other bioengineering groups. The research team used a "toolkit" of genetic parts that were invented in the lab and paired these parts with computational tools for stimulating many potential genetic programs before conducting experiments. Researchers have found that a wide variety of genetic programs carry out a desired and useful function in a human cell. They can be constructed in a way that each program works as predicted.