Most cancer patients die of metastasis, a process of cancer cells migrating into the bloodstream and colonizing new sites in the body. Why this happens is elusive. It does not seem to be driven by new mutations compared to the primary tumor. Instead, protein levels seem to shift in metastatic cells, making them migratory and invasive without new genetic changes. This suggests that by controlling protein levels, we might be able to stop metastasis. However, which proteins should we control and how? We have developed synthetic gene circuits that work as genetic dimmers, enforcing uniform and linearly inducer-dependent levels of a chosen protein across cell populations. These synthetic gene circuits could deliver precise perturbations to unravel the connectivity and dynamics of metastasis-regulatory networks, which are important steps towards rational reprogramming of metastatic cancer.
Gábor Balázsi received his undergraduate Physics degree at the Babeş-Bolyai University in Kolozsvár (Cluj), Romania. In 1997, he started graduate school at the University of Missouri at Saint Louis, USA, as a PhD student with Professor Frank Moss. His PhD research was on perturbation propagation and synchronization in normal and epileptic neurons and glial cells. In 2002, he continued as a postdoctoral fellow in Systems Biology at Northwestern University in Chicago, studying gene-regulatory network response to environmental changes with Professors Zoltán N. Oltvai and Albert-László Barabási. In 2005 he became a postdoctoral fellow at Boston University with Professor James J. Collins. There he designed synthetic gene circuits to study how cellular diversity promotes drug resistance. He continued and expanded these efforts in his own laboratory over the last decade (8 of which were at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas), building a growing library of synthetic gene circuits first in yeast, and then in cancer cells. As the Henry Laufer Associate Professor of Physical and Quantitative Biology at Stony Brook University he leads an interdisciplinary research group, which utilizes synthetic gene circuits to control gene expression in yeast and human cells. Their goal is to understand fundamental biological processes underlying microbial drug resistance and cancer. Dr. Balázsi was one of the recipients of the 2009 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, which was created to “stimulate highly innovative research and support promising new investigators”. His research group is half-experimental and half-computational, fostering interdisciplinary training while advancing the frontiers of quantitative biology.
