Description:

The Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics invites faculty, staff, and students to a faculty candidate research presentation by Patrick Cahan, PhD, Post-Doctoral Fellow with the Daley Laboratory, Division of Hematology/Oncology at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Enhancing Stem Cell Engineering Through Network Biology

Somatic cell reprogramming, directed differentiation of pluripotent stem cells, and direct conversions between differentiated cell lineages represent powerful approaches to engineer cells for applications in research and regenerative medicine. However, most cell engineering protocols fail to faithfully recapitulate target cell properties. We developed a network biology platform (CellNet) to assess the fidelity of cellular engineering and to generate specific hypotheses for improving cell derivations. In this seminar, I will describe the principles that emerged by applying the platform to most cell engineering studies, and its prospective application to improve cell fate engineering. I will finish by sharing current and future directions to use network biology to improve cell fate engineering and in-vitro disease modeling.