Tan Lab
Principal Investigator: Cheemeng Tan
Institution: University of California, Davis (Davis, CA)
Primary Subfield: Synthetic Bio
Recruitment Status: Inquire for rotation/fellowship opportunities
Research Focus
PROJECT SUMMARY Bottom-up, high-throughput prototyping of extracellular vesicle mimetics using cell-free synthetic biology Cells secrete extracellular vesicles (EVs) that function as primary messengers of intercellular communication and are studied as promising drug-delivery vehicles and therapeutics. However, the clinical application of native EVs has been hindered by their low production yield, impurity, and inherent heterogeneity. Native EVs contain many biologically active components, such as RNAs and proteins, spread out over numerous subpopulations. This biological complexity is both the strength and the Achilles’ heel of native EVs. While various features of this complexity enable the beneficial therapeutic effects of EVs, it is not clear which plays a dominant role. However, the complex set of proteins and RNAs results in heterogeneous EVs that are challenging to study and use as a standardized treatment. Therefore, separating out and defining the critical biomolecular features from the overall heterogeneous set will allow us to perform quality control of EVs and to reproducibly produce or study EVs. A major bottleneck in finding the critical molecular parts of EVs is the l…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01EB034279-04: Bottom-up, high-throughput prototyping of extracellular vesicle mimetics using cell-free synthetic biology (2026)
- 3R01EB034279-04S1: Bottom-up, high-throughput prototyping of extracellular vesicle mimetics using cell-free synthetic biology (2026)
- 2R35GM142788-06: Engineering and dissecting the synthetic non-dividing-but-active state of hybrid cell-materials (2026)
- 5R01EB034279-03: Bottom-up, high-throughput prototyping of extracellular vesicle mimetics using cell-free synthetic biology (2025)
- 3R01EB034279-03S1: Bottom-up, high-throughput prototyping of extracellular vesicle mimetics using cell-free synthetic biology (2025)
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