The Zhou Lab at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School integrates biomolecular engineering, chemical biology, and synthetic biology to study and rewire how cells perceive and transduce signals from the cell surface. We engineer biological degraders, state-specific protein binders, and allosteric enzymes to investigate cellular responses to extracellular signals and study how these processes are altered in diseases.
Engineering Binding: We design biologics that can recognize protein epitopes that are difficult to detect using conventional binding modalities.
Designing Conditional Activation: We build "activity atlases" for tumor microenvironments to understand cancer progression.
Rewiring Cellular Responses to Proteins: We develop bifunctional antibodies to reprogram cellular responses and target undrugged pathways.
Building Allosteric Protein Switches: We create single-chain, binding-activated enzymes, ligands, and receptors for rewiring cellular pathways.
The pathways and disease models of interest include:
Receptor tyrosine kinase signaling and drug resistance mechanism in non-small cell lung cancer
Immune checkpoint receptor and receptor proximal signaling mechanism in T cells and Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR)-T cells
G-protein coupled receptor in autoimmune and cancer
