Synthetic Biologic Application to T-cell Engineering

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T-effector cells (T-cells) are immune cells whose major role is surveillance for and destruction of virally infected cells. These cells are capable of homing to the sites of infection where they exit the vasculature, divide and kill infected cells but leave uninfected cells unharmed. We have long sought to harness their potency and extreme selectivity for therapeutic purposes.T-cells can be easily obtained from blood and cultured and expanded in vitro. Further, it has been possible to selectively expand T-cells specific for a particular virus in vitro. Administration of these specific T-cell populations are remarkably effective and non-toxic treatments for certain rare virally driven cancers. Until recently however, it has been difficult if not impossible to select and expand T-cell populations specific for more common cancers since cancer cells, unlike virally infected cells do not contain foreign proteins. Gene vector technology developed for gene-therapy have allowed us a radically solution: By introducing a new gene coding for an artificial receptor, we can easily generate large populations of T-cells specific for any antigen. This approach of using genetically engineered T-cells as a medical therapy, has been tested by us and others in early clinical studies with much promise.The T-cell engineering field however is still in its infancy. Typically, we introduce a single new gene into T-cells to cause a simple change such as an alteration of specificity. Although a range of different engineering components have been made for example triggering homing to certain tissues, inducing enhanced proliferation etc. these components do not interconnect with each other. In addition, they are not well characterized - for instance triggering thresholds, dynamic range of signalling etc might be unknown. This means that T-cell engineering is inefficient, relying largely on trial error. Finally, in its current state, the tremendous potential of engineering T-cells with very complex new behaviours cannot be realized. Synthetic biology is a new area of biological research that combines science and engineering. It attempts to formalize the engineering of complex biological systems not found in nature by applying principles developed largely in electronic engineering. We believe the logical next step is to bring T-cell engineering into the synthetic biology era.To achieve this, we plan the following: (1) generate a set of advanced inter-connectible T-cell engineering components (parts); (2) characterize their dynamic functional characteristics in detail; Once some of these parts are constructed and characterised we will apply for other funding to develop numeric methods to model systems developed from combinations of these components. This will allow us to develop complex systems based on these models first in silico, then in actuality.with this work, we hope to advance the T-cell engineering field into the synthetic biology era. We anticipate that we will be able to then create advanced therapies based on heavily engineered T-cells leading to an entirely new field of therapeutics.