Andy Wang Founder & CEO
From the level of cells, organs, and body systems to individuals and populations, this symposium, broken into three half-day webinars, will highlight the needs for new SENSE technologies, showcase research and innovations, and present the impact of these technologies. Over a series of invited technical talks, presentations by MIT-launched startups, student videos, and panel discussions, we will provide needs context and solution perspectives in the domains of sensing for the study of biology and for the care of humans in their natural environment.
William Oliver
Gene therapeutic applications, including ex vivo and in vivo gene replacement and editing, often require a long, single-stranded template or donor DNA. Conventional solid-phase DNA synthesis is limited to short oligonucleotides, and enzymatic synthesis is challenging to scale for quantities needed in pre-clinical and clinical studies. In the first part of the talk, the speakers will show how DNA can be used to fabricate virus-like particles for early stage, in vitro studies of prophylactic vaccine candidates in HIV and SARS-CoV-2, and then give an outlook on therapeutic, cancer vaccines. In the second part of this talk, they will present a scalable, biotechnological process developed to achieve production of grams and larger quantities of single-stranded DNA of custom sequence with lengths up to ten kilobases, and will then highlight important milestones for pharmaceutical-grade manufacturing on an industrial scale.