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:

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

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

• Can CAR T cells be deployed as therapies to treat rare cancer types where cellular immunotherapies are needed but remain unproven?