Leonard Lab
Principal Investigator: Joshua Nathaniel Leonard
Institution: Northwestern University (Chicago, IL)
Primary Subfield: Synthetic Bio
Recruitment Status: Inquire for rotation/fellowship opportunities
Research Focus
Project Summary The overarching goal of this project is to enable the use of engineered cell therapies to safely and effectively treat conditions ranging across cancer, autoimmune disease, and regenerative medicine. Engineered cell therapies are an exciting frontier, with early successes in cancer treatment demonstrating the transformative potential of this approach. Customized cell therapies could yield safe and effective treatments for many applications beyond cancer, but realizing this potential is limited by the fact that evaluating a potential therapeutic strategy requires extensive time and resources to implement it. The goal of this project is to flip this paradigm— to enable spending less time building and thus focus on evaluating potentially useful strategies. This project will develop state-of-the-art technologies for cell engineering and enable their application to solve three open, complementary, clinically motivated challenges. The first aim is to develop the technology, understanding, and computational tools required to build genetic programs that employ natural mechanisms for implementing long-lived memory. Natural systems employ genetic memory to drive processes suc…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01EB026510-08: Design-driven engineering of robust mammalian sense-and-respond functions: from parts to programs (2026)
- 5R01EB026510-07: Design-driven engineering of robust mammalian sense-and-respond functions: from parts to programs (2025)
- 5R01EB026510-06: Design-driven engineering of robust mammalian sense-and-respond functions: from parts to programs (2024)
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