Dr. Gabor Balazsi, a Henry Laufer Professor of Physical and Quantitative Biology in the Laufer Center at Stony Brook University, was recently named a fellow at the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).
AIMBE is an organization dedicated to representing bioengineers and providing outreach and scientific counsel to outside parties, such as the United States government.
To become an AIMBE fellow, you must be nominated by someone who is already a fellow. Then the whole organization, comprising more than 3,000 fellows, will vote whether or not you will be accepted.
“In my case, my chairman nominated me, the chair of the [Department of Biomedical Engineering],” Balazsi said.
AIMBE often works to advocate for public policy that supports medical and biological engineering. Balazsi participated in one of these advocacy events in Capitol Hill, pushing for more funding for institutions like Stony Brook that facilitate boundary pushing research.
Yi-Xian Qin, the chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, has high hopes for Balazsi’s work. According to Qin, this gene editing technology could potentially be used to diagnose disease.
“To be elected as the 2025 Class of the AIMBE Fellow places [Balazsi] among the top 2% of medical and biological engineers. I am very glad that his contribution to science is recognized by AIMBE,” Qin said.
Balazsi specializes in synthetic biology, where he works to map out the causes and effects of biology. He and his colleagues in the Laufer Center are currently working on developing a method of cellular control through genome editing.
“There are two steps. First we prepare the genome to accept what we build, and then we engineer something that we put in there, in the human genome, without additional effects,” Balazsi said.
Balazsi explained that this research, once completed, would make major strides in the field of gene therapy.
“By precisely controlling [the cells] protein levels, [there] could be a new approach to medicine. Most current drugs are designed to inhibit or kill unwanted cells, such as cancerous cells or infectious bacteria,” Balazsi said. “Our approaches of cellular control could allow reprogramming cells towards better, normal behavior rather than killing them.”
While his work involves the use of CRISPR, a gene-editing tool, Balazsi claims that his team’s method sidesteps its typical issues.
“The standard CRISPR/Cas system breaks the genome in a location defined by a Guide RNA. Then the cell repairs the break in various ways. If we provide a genetic sequence, the cell can insert it into the break. Two problems arise: unwanted breaks in different locations and unwanted, unknown mutations as the cell repairs all breaks. The defects can differ in every cell,” Balazsi said. “With our methods, we first use CRISPR/Cas to insert a ‘Landing Pad’ into a safe location. Then we select single cells with minimal or no defects. We can then insert any genetic sequence into this Landing Pad CRISPR-free, without any breaks or mutation, by a process called recombination.”
Balazsi and his team are currently using their technology to map out cell and protein interactions.
“The proteins are the determinants in what cells do, how they behave,” Balazsi said. “By changing the protein levels, we hope to change cell behavior in good ways or even just study how they can go bad or how they go into a deceased state due to inappropriate protein levels.”
Balazsi has worked on his genetic modification tools for nearly a decade and shows no signs of stopping.
“We aim to control cells by controlling protein levels precisely inside human cells,” Balazsi exclaimed. “However, there are more than 100,000 human proteins, and we often see surprising effects. While we have progressed a lot, there is still a lot to do. We hope that only a few proteins need to be controlled for controlling specific cell behaviors, such as metastatic behaviors.”
