2019 Undergraduate Summer Research Program Participant
Home Department: Bioengineering
Mentor: Lei Stanley Qi, Bioengineering and Chemical & Systems Biology
Recent developments in CRISPR technologies allow for unprecedented control of cellular behavior. Systems have been developed to engineer “sense and respond” cells that can detect and integrate relevant inputs in order to initiate cellular programs. Using a specific protein developed by the Qi lab, Kasey seeks to implement logic gating into such systems for the development of immunotherapy applications. Her project aims to design a logical gate that can respond to cues from a tumor microenvironment, thereby regulating expression of target genes involved in an anti-tumoral immune response.