Projects

Final projects:

  • In Silico Design of a Humanized Chimeric Arginine Deiminase ABSTRACT Arginine deiminase (ADI) is a bacterial enzyme with promising therapeutic potential for the treatment of arginine-auxotrophic cancers such as hepatocellular carcinoma, melanoma, and mesothelioma. ADI exerts its antitumor effect by depleting extracellular arginine, an amino acid essential for the survival of certain tumor cells lacking argininosuccinate synthetase expression. Despite its therapeutic promise, the bacterial origin of ADI leads to high immunogenicity, which may trigger immune responses, reduce enzyme efficacy, and limit repeated administration. This project aims to design a humanized chimeric ADI in silico by identifying immunogenic epitopes in bacterial ADI and substituting them with structurally analogous regions from the human arginine-metabolizing enzyme while preserving catalytic function. Structural modeling, immunogenic epitope prediction, molecular docking, and protein validation analyses will be performed to evaluate the stability and substrate-binding ability of the engineered chimera. The resulting humanized ADI is expected to exhibit reduced immunogenicity while maintaining therapeutic activity, providing a potential strategy for improving enzyme-based cancer therapies.
  • Hypothesis: Substitution of a bacteriophage’s replisome with an orthogonal T7 replisome for continuous hypermutation directed towards stability Group Members: Alan Bravo https://pages.htgaa.org/2026a-alan-bravo Samudera Mukhalid https://pages.htgaa.org/2026a-samudera-mukhalid Bacteriophage Engineering Challange Choosen: Stability Proposal This proposal is inspired by the article by Diercks et al. (2024), which harnesses a highly error-prone replisome to drive extreme antibiotic resistance evolution. Primary Goal #1: Enhance bacteriophage resilience to varying environmental conditions, such as temperature and pH. Primary Goal #2: Achieve this stability without impairing the bacteriophage’s infectivity.