LIOR NISSIM LAB

Biography

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I am a biologist with multidisciplinary training in biology, biophysics, and synthetic biology. My research interests center on developing novel synthetic biology platforms for biomedical applications, and to study clinically relevant biological questions. 

During My Ph.D., I pioneered the very first synthetic gene-circuit that actuated Boolean-logic to precisely target cancer cells by the integrated activity of multiple tumor-specific promoters, namely Dual-Promoter Integrator (DPI). We later implemented the DPI to demonstrate that tumor heterogeneity mediates inherent sensitivity–specificity tradeoff in cancer targeting by synthetic circuits.

In my postdoctoral research, I developed several novel synthetic biology platforms. First, I developed synthetic RNA-based gene circuits for cancer immunotherapy that precisely identify cancer cells and drives the tumor-specific expression of immunostimulatory outputs. This approach could potentially be implemented as powerful new immunotherapy modalities, and to study tumor immunology. In addition, I developed a high-throughput screening approach for identifying Synthetic Promoters with Enhanced Cell-State Specificity (SPECS) that could potentially provide compact synthetic promoters with enhanced specificity to virtually any cell-state, without prior gene regulation or transcriptome data. Finally, I developed an integrated RNA and CRISPR/Cas gene regulation toolkit that enabled easy, customizable, and scalable manipulation of human cells. This approach enabled a shift from the construction of only constitutively active single-layer taCas9 based circuits to the engineering inducible multi-layer cascades and synchronized networks.