LSI wins seed grant from the Petit Institute

The labs of Gabe Kwong (assistant professor, Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering) and M.G. Finn (professor, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry) were awarded a grant for “Activity biosensors that implement Boolean logic as precision diagnostics for immunotherapy.” The researchers reason that disease detection and evaluation of treatment responses in vivo depend on the ability to extract clinically useful information from complex biological systems. Noting that previous work in biological computing led to the use of genetic and cell-based tools, they propose that developing programmable biomaterials to perform basic computations, such as Boolean logic, may provide a new framework to increase detection precision and resistance to biological noise.

The Petit Institute Seed Grants provide year-one funding of $50,000 with equivalent year-two funding contingent on submission of an NIH R21/R01 or similar collaborative grant proposal within 12 to 24 months of the year-one start date (July 1, 2019).