Proposed Implementation

CARPE's Implementation and Role in Global Health

We believe that the novel technological advances of the century, including softwares such as AlphaFold, can have major impacts on creating larger evolutionary steps to reach ultimate biomarker detection. Furthermore, optimizing directed evolution can allow for faster development of new therapeutics, and introducing computational tools in this process can reduce development costs, making synthetic biology-based treatments more accessible to a larger population. With this intended cell-based biosensor, it does not require the resource-intensive purification processes that are characteristic of protein-based sensing techniques. Additionally, with a computational pipeline that can output which residues are most effective for the cell-based biosensor, there is no longer the time-intensive process of random mutagenesis required for directed evolution. In situations like a global health emergency, this technology becomes extremely necessary for rapid responses in detecting the onset of new diseases, where the biosensor can be reengineered quickly to detect new biomarkers and distributed on a global scale.

Our project is important in disease detection applications, where the pipeline enables the construction of a yeast biosensor that can be employed for early-detection of biomarkers pertaining to certain diseases. This medically-oriented project is especially relevant for our direct community; Harvard’s location within a central healthcare network in Boston include world-renowned institutions such as Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. We plan to apply our project for detection of a biomarker pertinent to kidney diseases; however, the pipeline can be generalized for a wide variety of diseases. For a larger outreach, this pipeline can be implemented as a versatile, user-friendly, and low-cost biosensor across hospitals around the world.