Luke R

- Research Program Mentor

Project ideas

Use CRISPR to design and insert a synthetic gene into human cells.

This project will teach you how to create a novel synthetic gene to express inside a human cell. This gene will be used to improve the function of a cell in a number of various ways. You will learn how to design the gene insert, clone the gene and perform the lab scientist work. We will use gene design software which is freely available to use for all my students.

Write a review article about your immune cell of choice and how it behaves during infection or against cancer.

Choose an important immune cell of choice such as a Natural Killer cell, T cell, B cell or dendritic cell. Together we will describe the journey this cell takes on its infection or tumor fighting mission. We will use other review and primary research articles to understand this process. We will then write an article outlining this process which will include graphics we can create using a free software that allows the generation of powerful and detailed biological processes.

Create an engineering plan: How to scale up CAR T cell manufacturing (huge bottleneck in the field)

Here we will dive into the difficult process known as upscaling to create cell therapies that can be used to fight cancer. Cell therapies known as "immunotherapies" are therapeutics in which a patients cancer fighting T or NK cells are taken from their blood, enhanced and expanded using a number of techniques and then re-infused into the patient in order to target their cancer. The process from doing this in a small scale to a large scale of millions to billions of engineered cells has a lot of challenges. We will generate an engineering plan to improve this process