We are pleased to welcome Professor Stanley Qi of Stanford University as our 2017-2018 Rising Star speaker.
Please join us!
Wednesday, April 11
12:00 – 1:00 PM
106 Stanley Hall
“Beyond Editing: Exploring and Engineering a Living Genome Using a Dead Molecule”
Stanley Qi
Assistant Professor
Department of Bioengineering, ChEM-H
Stanford University
Abstract:
Synthetic manipulation of the genome is key to understanding the genetic makeup of living organisms, and holds great promise for curing diseases. Despite significant advances of CRISPR technology development to editing the genome sequence or regulating gene expression, genome engineering, broadly defined, is still in its infancy for studying and engineering diverse features inherent to the genome. Beyond editing, our lab has previously developed a nuclease-dead Cas9 (dCas9) platform for synthetic transcriptional or epigenetic control on the genome. Here I present recent data that expands the dCas9 platform for engineering the 3-dimensional (3D) chromosomal organization, and exploring 3D chromosome interaction with nuclear compartments. We applied CRISPR tools to synthetic biology, and developed a class of input-output (I/O) molecular devices that combine dCas9 regulators with cellular sensors including GPCR (G-Protein Coupled Receptor) and CAR (Chimeric Antigen Receptor). We show immune cells engineered with I/O devices allow accurate decision making and better recognition and killing of cancer cells. We apply dCas9 tools to gain a quantitative understanding of the relationship between genotype and phenotype, and report how this quantitative relationship determines cell fate. Via this work, we aim to lay out a generic bioengineering platform that allow multi-purpose interrogation of the genome, including studying the genome function ranging from nanoscales to microscales (nucleotide bases to 3D genome organization), devising synthetic biology approaches to design mammalian cells for therapy, and probing the genome for its casual and quantitative relationship to phenotypes.
Bio:
Dr. Stanley Qi is an assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering, and Department of Chemical and Systems Biology at Stanford University. He is a core member of the new Stanford cross-campus institute ChEM-H. He is a UC Berkeley alumni Class ’12, with a PhD in Bioengineering. Before PhD, he obtained B.S. in Physics and Math from Tsinghua University, China, and Master in Physics from UC Berkeley working with Prof. Steven Chu. During his PhD work at Berkeley, he studied synthetic biology with Adam Arkin, and engineering of CRISPR for gene regulation co-advised by Adam Arkin and Jennifer Doudna. After PhD, he skipped postdoc training and joined UCSF as a Systems Biology Faculty Fellow and started his lab there since 2012. He joined Stanford faculty in 2014.
Dr. Qi is a pioneer in the CRISPR technology development, an inventor of CRISPR interference (CRISPRi) and dCas9 technology, and a co-inventor of the UC patent on the original CRISPR technology. He has developed a number of CRISPR technologies, including regulation of transcription, epigenetics, 3D genome organization, genome imaging, and genetic screening. He has won awards including NIH Director’s Early Independence Award, Pew Biomedical Scholar, and Alfred. P. Sloan Fellowship. His current research focuses on developing a universal genome engineering platform that enables interrogation of the genome from nanoscales to microscales, and applying the genetic engineering to better immunotherapy of cancers and degenerative diseases.
Past Rising Stars
2016-17
Professor Kim Woodrow of the University of Washington
“Engineering the mucosal microenvironment promotes targeting of particulate and cellular immunotherapies to lymphoid organs”