We live in a moment of striking contradiction. Nearly a billion people suffer from food scarcity and malnutrition, even as obesity and metabolic disease reach epidemic proportions.
The cure for cancer is inside us, in the revolutionary power of our own immune systems, yet these therapies still fail in the majority of patients who receive them. We have sequenced the human genome and mapped the code of life itself, yet still lack cures for the complex chronic diseases that define modern medicine.
We at the Bailis Lab don't see these as failures of science or medicine, but as symptoms of their success. In mastering the genetic code, we've overlooked the infrastructure needed to carry out its instructions. The answers we’re searching for live where biology is most basic: in the chemistry that keeps life running.
At the Bailis Lab, we study how the immune system decides what its cells can become, to help build the next generation of therapies. Every instruction a cell receives makes a demand: to change, to multiply, to perform, to persist. Whether that demand can be met depends on a much older cellular economy, one built to balance growth against supply.
We've shown that this balance between biosynthetic capacity and environment is as decisive to a cell's fate as the genetic program itself. We study this in the settings where it matters most for human health: cancer immunotherapy, protective immunity to infection, and malnutrition.
Our goal is to translate this fundamental biology into new, more effective and affordable diagnostics and therapies that broaden access to care.
Come meet the metaBailites! We’re a collaborative and relentlessly curious crew, who care about what cells consume as much as we love eating ourselves.
We live in a moment of striking contradiction. Nearly a billion people suffer from food scarcity and malnutrition, even as obesity and metabolic disease reach epidemic proportions.
The cure for cancer is inside us, in the revolutionary power of our own immune systems, yet these therapies still fail in the majority of patients who receive them. We have sequenced the human genome and mapped the code of life itself, and still lack cures for the complex chronic diseases that define modern medicine.
We at the Bailis Lab don’t see these as failures of science or medicine, but as symptoms of their success. In mastering the genetic code, we’ve overlooked the infrastructure needed to carry out its instructions. The answers we’re searching for live where biology is most basic: in the chemistry that keeps life running.
At the Bailis Lab, we study how the immune system decides what its cells can become, to help build the next generation of therapies.
Every instruction a cell receives makes a demand: to change, to multiply, to perform, to persist. Whether that demand can be met depends on a much older cellular economy, one built to balance growth against supply. We’ve shown that this balance between biosynthetic capacity and metabolic environment is as decisive to a cell’s fate as the genetic program itself.
We study this in the settings where it matters most for human health: cancer immunotherapy, protective immunity to infection, and malnutrition. Our goal is to translate this fundamental biology into new, more effective and affordable diagnostics and therapies that broaden access to care.
Come meet the metaBailites! We’re a collaborative and relentlessly curious crew, who care about what cells consume as much as we love eating ourselves.