Gene therapies and CAR-T cell interventions offer great hope to the future of modern medicine. These therapies currently come with a great deal of risk to the patient, which may lead to cancer, dangerous immune responses, and other unpredictable outcomes. In fact, current gene therapies are designed with zero to few safety mechanisms. It's almost like designing a car with no brakes; something is bound to go wrong eventually. 

The mission of this project is to create a series of drug-inducible switches which can be added to various therapies to make them safer. This will allow for CAR-T cell therapies that are inducible in a dose dependent manner, preventing runaway immune responses. It will allow for in-vivo control of gene therapies either to induce or slow gene expression, as well as the ability to completely delete episomal changes, ultimately resulting in fully reversible gene therapies. Our efforts will allow any researcher or engineer to easily incorporate our safety switches into their designs to dramatically alter the risk profile of their interventions.

Current inducible systems include things like tetracycline or caffeine switches. Unfortunately, these systems require the use of foreign proteins which can provoke an immune response that can lead to cell death. Other switching systems rely on drugs, such as potent immune modulators, which are not suitable for widespread use in all patients. To address this, we will design switches keyed to drugs that offer the highest patient safety levels, the least number of side effects, and reports of allergic response. Ideally, we will create inducible switches that will not be reliant on the use of foreign proteins, and will be well tolerated in children, pregnant, or nursing persons.