(311g) Invited: Engineering Protein Assemblies for Precision Health: Artificial Antigen Presentation and Epitope Discovery

Over more than 500 million years of evolution, nature has relied on the cooperation of functionally related proteins to perform complex tasks in all life forms ranging from unicellular organisms to human. Harnessing this functional cooperatively remains a grand challenge in synthetic biology. In the past two decades, by focusing on the engineering of single target proteins, a great number of value-added natural and unnatural proteins have been successfully generated and commercialized, such as monoclonal antibodies, industrial enzymes, protein pharmaceuticals, etc. Looking forward to address challenges in more complex systems, the next generation protein engineering strategies that focus on the cooperative function by bringing related proteins together to form assemblies are desired. In this presentation, I will discuss how these novel strategies will lead to enabling technologies in precision health, especially with respect to T-cell based immunotherapy.