Mice Against Ticks: Engineering white-footed mice to prevent Lyme disease
Kevin Esvelt, MIT
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Abstract:
Kevin will give us an update on his project to bioengineer mice to make them less effective as vectors that spread tick-borne diseases.

An earlier version of this work is described in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6452264/pdf/rstb20180105.pdf.

Kevin will give us an update on this project and explain how his team succeeded in engineering white-footed mice and what's involved in the field trials that will eventually allow the re-engineered mice to be introduced into the wild.

Bio:

Kevin Esvelt is Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, NEC Career Development Professor of Computer and Communications and director of the Sculpting Evolution group at the MIT Media Lab. His group invents new ways to study and influence the evolution of ecosystems.

He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University for inventing a synthetic microbial ecosystem to rapidly evolve useful biomolecules, and subsequently helped pioneer the development of CRISPR, a powerful new method of genome engineering.

In 2013, Esvelt was the first to identify the potential for CRISPR “gene drive” systems to alter wild populations of organisms. Recognizing the implications of an advance that could enable individual scientists to alter the shared environment, he and his colleagues chose to break with scientific tradition by revealing their findings and calling for open discussion and safeguards before building the first CRISPR-based gene drive system and demonstrating reversibility in the laboratory.

An outspoken advocate of sharing research plans to accelerate discovery and improve safety, Esvelt's MIT lab seeks to accelerate beneficial advances while safeguarding biotechnology against mistrust and misuse. Projects include building catalytic platforms for directed evolution, pioneering new ways of developing ecotechnologies with the guidance of local communities, developing early-warning systems to reliably detect any catastrophic biological threat, applying cryptographic methods to enable secure and universal DNA synthesis screening, and advising policymakers on how best to mitigate global catastrophic biorisks.

His work has been published in Nature and Science, covered by the New York Times and Washington Post, and featured on Last Week Tonight and the Netflix special Unnatural Selection.