Khalil Lab
Principal Investigator: Ahmad Samir Khalil
Institution: Harvard University (Cambridge, MA)
Primary Subfield: Synthetic Bio
Recruitment Status: ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
PROJECT SUMMARY Synthetic gene circuits that enable precise, customizable control of gene regulation and human cell function can address unmet needs in biology, medicine, and synthetic biology, ranging from next-generation cell-based therapies to programming tissue function. However, the lack of engineering toolkits that provide robust in vivo activity, clinically-suitable compositions, and easy implementation for implementing gene circuits in biomedically- relevant human cell types has drastically limited our ability to realize these important biomedical goals. To overcome these limitations, our collaborative team recently established a powerful set of toolkits that enable the construction of “clinically-optimized” synthetic circuits for (FDA-approved) drug-inducible and cell-autonomous control of therapeutic human cell function. Using these toolkits, we already succeeded in engineering advanced control of primary human T cells, such as programming T cells to recognize multi-faceted features of target cells and launch complex, multi-tiered therapeutic actions – foundational work that serves as the basis of a recently launched clinical trial for next-generation cellular therapy. In…
Active NIH Awards
- 7R01EB029483-07: Synthetic circuit technologies for precision control and signal processing in mammalian cells (2026)
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