BioCentury
ARTICLE | Translation in Brief

Programming cell circuits

How two teams designed programmable cell circuits regulated by viral proteases

October 31, 2018 10:20 PM UTC

Two synthetic biology teams have developed methods to regulate cell behavior at the protein level using viral proteases. The work could aid the development of conditionally activated cancer therapies that bypass the risk of insertional mutagenesis and immunogenicity observed in DNA-encoded therapies.

In a September paper published in Science, a team from the California Institute of Technology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) developed its protein circuits to induce cell death in response to oncogene activation...