Dickinson Lab
Principal Investigator: Bryan Dickinson
Institution: University of Chicago (Chicago, IL)
Primary Subfield: Synthetic Bio
Recruitment Status: ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Project Summary Genetic deletion (haploinsufficiency) or duplication events are often associated with a variety of diseases, including: cancers, cardiovascular and metabolic disease, and neuropathies. Because many genes are sensitive to both over- and under-expression, with imbalances in gene product in either direction leading to disease, tight regulatory control is a therapeutic necessity. RNA-targeting technologies, however, provide a mechanism to appropriately and reversibly modulate gene expression at the transcript level, resulting in tunable, cell-specific remediation of disease-causing shifts in gene dosage. Our recently developed CRISPR- Cas- inspired RNA targeting system (CIRTS), integrates small, human-derived proteins and guide RNA into an easily programmed and packaged technology for tunable gene expression manipulation at the transcript level. Notably, CIRTS imparts a major clinical advantage over that of functionally-related, but bacteria-derived CRISPR/Cas systems: minimized immunogenic risk stemming from the use of human protein parts. This proposal seeks to use protein engineering and cell-based screens to create highly efficient, optimized CIRTS- based technologi…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01EB035016-04: Engineering human-derived programmable RNA effectors to retune gene expression (2026)
- 2R35GM119840-11: Rapid selection approaches to understand and reprogram proteins and peptides (2026)
- 5R35GM119840-10: Chemical biology approaches to probe signaling by protein lipidation (2025)
- 5R01EB035016-03: Engineering human-derived programmable RNA effectors to retune gene expression (2025)
- 5R01EB035016-02: Engineering human-derived programmable RNA effectors to retune gene expression (2024)
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