Dr. Lior Nissim is an Assistant Professor leading the synthetic biology group in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem School of Medicine. His lab develop synthetic biology platforms implemented as effective, practical solutions for therapeutics and to decipher human biology.
Lior received his B.Sc. at the Tel-Aviv University. His M.Sc. comprised of basic cancer biology research in the lab of Prof. Varda Rotter, Department of Molecular Cell Biology, Weizmann Institute of Science. He then accomplished his Ph.D the multidisciplinary biophysics lab of Prof. Roy Bar-Ziv , Department of Materials and Interfaces, Weizmann Institute of Science. His postdoctoral training were performed in the synthetic biology group of Prof. Timothy K. Lu in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
During his Ph.D., Lior Pioneered the first synthetic gene circuit that actuated Boolean-logic to precisely target cancer cells by the integrated activity of multiple tumor-specific promoters, namely Dual-Promoter Integrator (DPI).
In his postdoctoral research, Lior developed several novel synthetic biology platforms, including:
• Synthetic RNA-based gene circuits that that precisely identifies cancer cells and drives tumor-specific expression of immunostimulatory outputs, which could potentially overcome major challenges in cancer immunotherapy.
• A high-throughput screening approach for identifying Synthetic Promoters with Enhanced Cell-State Specificity (SPECS) that could potentially provide compact synthetic promoters with enhanced specificity to virtually any cell-state, without prior gene regulation or transcriptome knowledge.
• An integrated RNA and CRISPR/Cas gene regulation toolkit that enabled easy, customizable and scalable manipulation of human cells.