I am a postdoctoral fellow in Carl de Boer’s laboratory at the UBC School of Biomedical Engineering, working at the intersection of regulatory genomics, machine learning, and gene therapy. My overall goal is to advance gene and cell therapies by making them precise enough to correct disease-causing DNA alterations only in the mutated cells, while leaving healthy cells untouched.
My disease focus is Kaposiform lymphangiomatosis, the most aggressive complex lymphatic malformation, in which a somatic mutation in the NRAS gene drives life-threatening lesions through the chest, abdomen, and bones. I build the therapy’s selectivity in three layers. I engineer a delivery vehicle that enters lymphatic endothelium and avoids other organs by targeting receptors enriched on the mutant cells; I use massively parallel reporter assays and machine learning models to design synthetic promoters active only in those cells; and I optimize gene editors that revert the NRAS mutation while sparing neighbouring positions.
My aim is to give patients with these rare conditions a precise genetic medicine and to establish a design approach that extends to any disease.
