Engineering platelets with synthetic biology

Tara Deans is an Associate Professor at the University of Utah (UT, USA) in the Biomedical Engineering Department whose research focuses on building synthetic gene circuits to reprogram cells. At this year’s European Laboratory Research and Innovation Group’s (ELRIG) Research and Innovation conference (29–30 March 2023; Cambridgeshire, UK), we caught up with Tara to learn more about what synthetic biology is and her research engineering platelets to target circulating tumor cells with the aim of preventing metastasis.   What is synthetic biology? Synthetic biology involves putting different genetic parts together, which will change the function of the cell. This is the...