Welcome to the Xin Zhou Lab at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute & Harvard Medical School! Working at the interface of biomolecular engineering and disease biology, the Zhou Lab integrates experimental and computational approaches from chemical biology, synthetic biology, and protein design to develop biologics for precisely sensing and modulation of diseases, with a particular focus on cell surface proteins and the surrounding disease microenvironments. We engineer biological degraders, state-specific protein binders, allosteric enzymes, and construct a disease microenvironment "activity atlas" to study and address challenging disease mechanisms. Our projects span four closely related research areas:
Engineering Binding:
Designing biologics that can recognize protein epitopes that are difficult to target using conventional binding modalities.
Designing Conditional Activation:
Constructing a biological "activity atlas" for disease microenvironments and establishing methods to harness these activities for precise disease diagnostics and therapies.
Rewiring Cellular Reponses to Biologic drugs:
Deciphering and reprogramming cellular responses to biomedicines to target pathways that were previously considered undruggable.
Building Allosteric Protein Switches:
Creating single-chain, binding-activated enzymes, ligands, and receptors for targeted proteome reprogramming.
