Santosh Narayan

Background

About Santosh Narayan

I am a scientist proficient in studying cell signaling and gene regulation and their applications to stem cells, induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), differentiation, epigenetics, and cancer. More recently, at Affini-T, my work involved engineering T-cells by targeted gene editing for TCR-based therapies specifically against neoantigens derived from common oncogenic mutations in solid tumors and functional assessments to verify their efficacy and safety. I successfully developed stem cell assays and technology that greatly improve the efficiency of deriving human iPSCs from donor cells belonging to genetically diverse individuals and older adults using a synthetic biology approach. Patient-derived iPSCs serve as excellent models and screening tools to understand how genetic backgrounds manifest disease phenotypes. I am a trained pharmacologist and neuroscientist with extensive experience in molecular biology, cell biology, neuroscience and functional genomics. I use high throughput technologies (coupled with NGS, imaging etc.) and gene editing (using CRISPR/Cas9) to study gene regulation and T-cell receptor activity.