About Me
Hi, I am Mrugank Dake and I am a graduate student at Clayspace Lab, New York University working on understanding the role of distributed representation in working memory. I am broadly interested in how memories are represented in the brain.
Prior to this, I completed my Bachelors and Masters dual degree from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Tirupati in 2021 with a major in Biology and a minor in Physics. During this period, I have worked on a range of topics in the domains of Synthetic biology, Cancer, Neurobiology, Computational Neuroscience, Ecoacoustics and Machine Learning.
When not having my nth cup of coffee or working with data, I love playing Chess, travelling and reading books.
Check out my CV for more details.
Publications and Posters
- CoCa coli: Probiotic immunotherapy against colon cancer; iGEM 2019 Poster Link
One of the major concerns with cancer treatment is the use of often invasive and unnatural therapeutic approaches. Cancer cells, owing to their high metabolic activity, resort to Warburg metabolism, thereby producing enormous amounts of lactate in their vicinity. We employed this flaw to produce genetically engineered E. coli to express lactate operon. Using proof-of-concent GFP reporter, we managed to optimize the lactate operon to be able to distinguish lactate concentrations observed in colon cancer tissues from healthy tissues. Additionally, we also expressed secretable IL-12 in these bacteria. The goal was to induce IL-12 secretion when the "probiotic" is in the vicinity of cancerous tissue. IL-12 is naturally suppressed around cancerous cells thereby making them invisible to the immune system. Additionally, in order to ensure specificity, we modified the FimH operon to express fimbriae that can specifically bind to colorectal cancer cells. This work was proof of concept with individual entities completed. We also provided a fluid dynamics model to help estimate the dosage of probiotic necessary to ensure efficient binding and degradation of the colorectal cancer mass.