Tal Danino

Tal Danino’s research explores the emerging field of synthetic biology, focusing on engineering bacteria gene circuits to create novel behaviors that have biomedical applications. His laboratory uses synthetic biology to engineer living medicines. They genetically program cells to sense and respond to diverse environments, enhanc­ing their spec­ificity and efficacy as therapeutic modalities. The primary focus of their research is to engineer bacteria as a cancer therapy, where we design microbes to produce molecules that activate anti-tumor immunity. This approach has key advantages in mitigating toxicities observed with systemic therapies, enabling immunoengi­neering of the tumor microenvironment. Beyond this focus, Danino's lab applies their methodology to broad disease indications such as inflammation and infec­tion, and engineer other modalities such as CAR-T cells and oncolytic viruses to act as cooperative therapies that interact with bacteria. Lastly, their lab also utilizes time-lapse microscopy, next-generation sequencing, and data science approaches to quantitatively understand the dynamics of cellular gene networks at the single-cell level, in turn feeding into the design of new genetic circuits for microbial therapeutics. Their ultimate aim is to advance these technologies to patients in the near term.