(3er) Using Cellular Engineering to Understand Cell Behaviors for Improved Health Care

As health care costs increase, it becomes increasingly important for us to develop effective disease treatment strategies that improve our quality of life without crippling personal or governmental finances. This aim requires a fundamental understanding of how mammalian cells use information about their surroundings to decide if they will grow, divide, migrate or die: a conceptual cellular process model. In traditional engineering applications, use of a poor process model to design control strategies will almost always result in poor system performance; likewise, in health care applications an inaccurate conceptual model of how cells respond to different environmental conditions can lead to ineffective or harmful therapeutic interventions.

Billions of dollars are spent each year on medical research, yet often the results of this work are inconclusive because they do not contribute to development of a useful cellular process model. I propose coordinated experimental and computational approaches that make the most of each experiment by designing and analyzing cell perturbations and responses with a goal of identifying how cells react to changing environmental and intracellular conditions. Using cutting edge experimental technologies, we can manipulate the cellular microenvironment by tuning physical and chemical variables of the cell culture system, and we can measure biochemical and phenomenological cell responses on various timescales while accounting for variables such as cell-cell heterogeneity and subcellular spatial distributions of signaling molecules. To this end, I will discuss how the techniques I developed during my doctoral and postdoctoral work lend themselves to this approach, and I will describe my plans for developing a world class laboratory in the area of cellular engineering.