CCMT Seminar Series - April 11, 2024

The Raymond G. Perelman Center for Cellular and Molecular Therapeutics presents a seminar series:

Precise Transcriptome Engineering for Cell Therapy and Neuroscience

Speaker

Stanley Qi, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Bioengineering
Sarafan ChEM-H, Stanford University
Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator

Host

Yuanquan Song, PhD

Please e-mail Dr. Song if you would like to meet with the speaker.

About the Research

Large-scale perturbation of the genome and transcriptome plays a key role in studying gene and metabolic pathways related to cellular functions. Our research has focused on developing technologies for editing the human epigenome and 3D genome via CRISPR-mediated tools. In this seminar, I will explore approaches for engineering the human transcriptome, the collection of mRNA molecules, by controlling either RNA abundance or spatial organization. We illustrate the applications of transcriptome engineering in modulating the function of primary human T cells. By controlling multiple RNAs and whole metabolic pathways such as sugar usage, we define the importance of metabolism in alleviating T cell exhaustion for cancer treatment. Furthermore, I discuss approaches to studying function of the spatial transcriptome in neurons. We believe technologies for large-scale transcriptome engineering opens a new direction for elucidating the function associated with RNA networks that contribute to cell engineering and therapy.