🔬We’re hiring!🧬Passionate about #cellengineering? The @roybal_lab at @UCSF is #hiring a technician to help unlock the potential of #TILtherapy with #synbio! Join our team and revolutionize #celltherapy for the patients who need it. DM for info and please RT!

Cute story alert!🧵@Caltech two clueless office mates (@piraner & I) created a tool to control cells with ultrasound. As postdocs (@UCSF & @UWproteindesign), we teamed up again (with @majo__duran & @AdamChazin) to build a tool for engineered cell signaling

I’m excited to share how a modular synthetic receptor called SNIPR opens new possibilities for immunotherapy by sensing both tumor-secreted factors and synthetic computationally designed soluble proteins:

Big news! 🥳🥂 In July 2025, I will be joining the faculty of University of Pennsylvania, @Penn_CBIO. The Goodman Lab for Synthetic Immunology will combine synthetic biology, genome engineering, and ML-driven functional genomics to study and manipulate primary immune cells. 🧵1/3

🇬🇧 In partnership with @ARIA_research, we’re bringing 5050 to the UK! 🇬🇧 The UK is a global powerhouse of invention. Penicillin, DNA’s double helix, MRIs, monoclonal antibodies, the electric motor, the telephone, and the World Wide Web were all invented or discovered by brilliant UK minds. Yet, none of those inventions were successfully commercialized in the UK. This is not a new story. In 1966, Charles Kao, a PhD from UCL, was working at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories in Essex, researching the potential of glass for optical communication. Everyone deemed glass a hopeless medium: light would scatter and fade too quickly for practical telecoms. Kao discovered, however, that if he could purify glass fibers enough, they could carry huge amounts of data over vast distances with minimal signal loss. The problem: to replace the standard of the day – copper wires – he’d need to slash signal loss from a whopping 1000 decibels per kilometer to 20, a decrease by a factor of 10^98. It seemed an impossible task. Kao struggled to find anyone to fund this effort until John Bray, the newly appointed research director at the British Post Office, recognized the potential. He funded the research and Kao was successful in demonstrating the potential of communicating over long distances using light in fiber optic cables. But it was an engineer who heard about Kao’s work on a visit from America – William Shaver from Corning Glass Works – who commercialised it. The Corning team he assembled used a 2000°C oven from the company’s semiconductor arm to produce a fiber with 17 dB/km loss. By 1972, they hit 4 dB/km – low enough to enable the internet. Corning's first commercial fiber optic system was deployed in Long Beach, California in 1977. Kao received the Nobel Prize in Physics, but it was a US industrial conglomerate, not its inventor, that turned this innovation into the backbone of global communication. It was a variation on a well-worn theme. Britain invents the future – then others go build it. This pattern is primed to be broken. 5050 will inspire and equip scientists and engineers in the UK to become great founders and build the next decade of civilization-defining companies. The first cohort starts early next year. Link below to be the first to hear when applications open.

Thrilled to share our work on novo protein LYTAC(pLYTAC)/EndoTag in @nature! Using de novo protein design, we created endocytosis triggering binding proteins (EndoTags) to degrade extracellular targets and amplify receptor signaling.