Gabriel Valentin Senn

When it comes to cancer treatments, one of the major challenges is how to make the therapy discriminate between friend and foe: we want to kill cancer cells but leave healthy tissue untouched. One way to do this might be to plug into the genetic mechanisms that drive cancers in the first place.

eLife Assessment This important study demonstrates the potential of synthetic gene circuits to detect and target aberrant RAS activity in cancer cell lines. The circuit design is novel and the evidence supporting the claims is convincing.

Abstract Therapies targeting mutated RAS, the most frequently mutated oncogene in human cancers, could benefit millions of patients. Recently approved RAS inhibitors represent a breakthrough, but are limited to a specific KRASG12C mutation and prone to resistance. Synthetic gene circuits offer a promising alternative by sensing and integrating cancer-specific biomolecular inputs, including mutated RAS, to selectively express therapeutic proteins in cancer cells.