Professor Khammash delivered a plenary lecture at the 2014 International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) World Congress, held in S. Africa in August.
The title of the external pagelecturecall_made given was "Cybergenetics: Feedback control of living cells at the gene level".
Abstract: Norbert Wiener’s 1948 Cybernetics presented a vision unifying the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine. Predating the discovery of the structure of DNA and the ensuing molecular biology revolution, applications in the life sciences at the time were limited. More than 60 years later, the confluence of modern genetic manipulation techniques, powerful measurement technologies, and advanced analysis methods is enabling a new area of research in which systems and control notions are used for regulating cellular processes at the gene level. We refer to this promising nascent field as Cybergenetics. This presentation describes novel analytical and experimental work that demonstrates how de novo control systems implemented with stochastic components can be interfaced with living cells and used to control their dynamic behavior. The feedback systems can either be realized on a computer (in-silico control) or through genetically encoded parts (in-vivo control). The two approaches will be compared and contrasted, and applications in biotechnology and therapeutics will be described.