Nathi Magubane
Imagine being at a big marquee event at an arena, like the Super Bowl, with the roar of the crowd, the smell of hot dogs, and a sea of jerseys all merging into one chaotic blur. While the frenzied, exciting environment certainly enhances your viewing experience, it can also make it difficult to find the people you came with if you get separated. If you’re communicating by phone or waving from the stands, it can be an exhausting game of hide-and-seek amid the noise and commotion.
Now imagine if you had a way to remotely guide them to you with pinpoint precision—an app that highlighted their exact location and gently nudged them to move in the right direction. That, in essence, is what bioengineer Lukasz Bugaj and his team at the University of Pennsylvania have achieved—except the arena is the human body, and the people you are directing are engineered cells sent in to carry out specific tasks like killing cancer or repairing damaged tissue.
“There’s a lot going on in complex living systems, so when we send modified cells into the body to execute a particular function, like to go in and find pathogens or cancerous cells, wouldn’t it be great if we could communicate with them, guide them, make sure they’re going exactly where they need to go, at the right time, to do the right thing?” asks Bugaj.
In a new paper, the Bugaj Lab introduces tools that essentially, “remotely and non-invasively communicate with and control the activity of cells” once they’ve entered the arena. Published in Nature Methods, the paper focuses on a protein the team developed called Melt, which can be toggled by temperature.