In this week’s episode, I sit down with Prof. Ron Weiss, the MIT pioneer who helped create the field of synthetic biology. We discuss the emergence of living therapeutics that can think, adapt, and make complex decisions inside the human body. The implications of this stretch from synthetic cells within implantable biosensors that can produce insulin based on real-time glucose sensing to self-amplifying RNAs encoding gene circuits that specifically detect and kill cancer cells.
Ron believes the future of medicine lies in treating biological systems as sophisticated analog computers… systems we can learn to program. And while this may still seem like a distant future, the first therapeutic fruits of this approach are already on their way to the market.
And in case you’re short on time, here’s a quick teaser on the “REACT” ARPA-H project that Ron’s lab is working on:
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Programming gene and engineered-cell therapies with synthetic biology
PERSIST platform provides programmable RNA regulation using CRISPR endoRNases
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