Program Goals

Through the Multicellular Design Program, we aim to accomplish the following goals:

Move synthetic biology past its focus on single cells
Bridge scales between the cellular and population levels in microbiome, immune, and tissue research
Build new multi-scale modeling and machine learning platforms that leverage the enormous advances in data science and computing
Identify new “general principles” of biological system organization
Advance these basic findings into clinical applications. The current generation of clinical therapies are designed and tested from studies on single cells. To make meaningful innovation in designing new smart treatments, we need to focus on multicellular systems where real biological diversity is represented and we can target the interactions in these diverse systems.