Laboratory for Nucleic Acid Nanotechnology (Bathe BioNanoLab)

The Laboratory of Professor Bathe at MIT uses nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) to engineer revolutionary new materials at the nanometer-scale, or nanoscale, where one nanometer is approximately 10,000x smaller than the thickness of an individual human hair.

One goal of these nanoscale materials is to enable the targeted, in vivo delivery of therapeutic nucleic acids such as siRNA, messenger RNA, and CRISPR to organs and tumors that are otherwise impossible to reach. Achieving this goal may help to develop cures for over 7,000 known genetic diseases, and cancer. Another goal of these nanoscale materials is to design new “qubits” that are the equivalent of “transistors” from conventional semi-conductor chips. Achieving this goal would enable highly parallel quantum computing at room temperature to augment conventional silicon computers that have reached the end of Moore’s Law. And a final goal of these nanoscale materials is to be able to write, store, and read massive datasets in a rapid, compact, and energy-efficient manner. Achieving this goal would offer the ability to make a low-cost, zettabyte-scale (1 trillion gigabytes) file system for the archival storage of all of the world’s information.