Running with leaders.
We have the good fortune of calling these industry, medical and scientific leaders our trusted advisors and colleagues, working alongside our team to realize the potential of synthetic biology to do more for patients.
Jim Collins, PhD
Co-Founder, Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science, MIT
Jim Collins, PhD
Tim Lu, MD, PhD
Co-Founder, Associate Professor, MIT
Timothy Lu, MD, PhD
Cammie Lesser, MD, PhD
Advisor, Associate Professor of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital
Cammie Lesser, MD, PhD
The Lesser lab is interested in understanding how bacterial pathogens manipulate host cell processes to promote their own survival and replication during the course of an infection. In particular, their efforts focus on determining how bacterial factors injected via type 3 protein delivery systems into the host cell cytosol act to disarm host innate immune responses, including the induction of pro-inflammatory cytokine production, pyroptosis and autophagy. Their studies focus on virulence factors from Gram-negative enteric pathogens that cause gastrointestinal diseases including Shigella, Salmonella, Yersinia and enteropathogenic E. coli. They have developed multiple innovative technologies to address these questions including an innovative bottom-up approach to study single, potentially functionally redundant effectors as well as yeast functional genomic and proteomic approaches to identify conserved eukaryotic signaling pathways targeted by the virulence proteins.
More recently, the Lesser lab has begun to exploit findings garnered from their mechanistic based studies to develop bacterial strains engineered to deliver proteins of therapeutic value rather than virulence proteins into host cells. Current efforts with this system are aimed at developing a viral-free protein delivery system for cellular reprogramming; for example, the conversion of fibroblasts into induced pluripotent stem cells. In addition, they have begun to develop commensal bacteria that act suppress inflammation by blocking the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines with the goal of utilizing these bacteria to develop a new targeted treatment for inflammatory bowel disease.