The cells that reside upon or within our bodies have the potential to sense when we are ill and respond by producing the appropriate drug to treat the disease. Such smart living therapeutics could exhibit higher effectiveness and lower side-effects than current drugs. Though biology has evolved to sense thousands of molecules linked to different diseases, only a tiny fraction can currently be sensed by engineered cells. The fundamental problem is the lack of a basic understanding about how the thousands of genetically-encoded sensors present in these living cells function. One focus of RSBI will be to elucidate the function of these natural sensors and to repurpose them as components in smart living therapeutics. These efforts will leverage unique research strengths at Rice and adjacency to the TMC, and they will focus on immune diseases, neurological diseases, and cancers. We will also leverage these sensors for non-invasive imaging and manipulation of tissues deep within the body to study physiology and disease. Finally, RSBI will help develop new modalities for engineering the microbial communities that live upon the human body to maintain health,
treat diseases, and prevent infections.