The current moment in cancer immunotherapy has been likened to the early days of the space race, and in this all-too-accurate analogy the patients are the astronauts sent on ballistic therapeutic arcs at the leading edge of human possibility. The Jan lab seeks to refine cell therapies as safe, effective, accessible, and ultimately routine modalities that ask less of people with cancer. We contribute to these goals by harnessing elegant protein degradation cellular machinery that has evolved to control fast biologic transitions related to information flow and signal processing, investigating the following questions:

• How does protein degradation shape immune cell function?

• How can we retarget protein degradation to enhance therapeutic cell programs?

• What are the design principles for adaptive, user-controllable cell therapies?

• What are the clinical settings to deploy smart next-generation cell therapies?