Welcome to the Horns lab!

The Horns Lab creates and uses new technologies to understand and manipulate cells. We aim to discover the fundamental principles governing how cells and tissues operate, and to harness these insights to improve human health. Our work unites molecular engineering, synthetic biology, and genomics to answer questions and solve problems in immunology, neuroscience, cancer, and aging.

Research Focus

Cellular dynamics

Cellular dynamics

Living cells change over time. These cellular dynamics underpin health and disease, but remain mostly hidden from us and hard to understand. We are developing and applying new approaches to track cellular dynamics and resolve how cells and tissues change. These approaches leverage synthetic biological devices, deep sequencing, and single-cell and spatial multi-omics to reveal the dynamics of cell populations, states, and interactions. We ultimately seek to uncover the principles of how cells and tissues operate in development, homeostasis, and disease.

Engineering vesicles

Engineering vesicles

Extracellular vesicles mediate cell-cell communication and are a promising vehicle for drug delivery. However, the mechanisms that govern interactions between vesicles, cells, and tissues are poorly defined. We are using systematic approaches to reveal these mechanisms, including deciphering the molecular logic of vesicle biogenesis, trafficking, uptake, and cargo delivery. We aim to leverage this understanding to improve vesicle-based biotechnologies and drug delivery.

Discovering biotechnology

Discovering biotechnology

Today’s confluence of large-scale metagenomic sequencing, affordable DNA synthesis, and AI/ML techniques for protein design and structure prediction creates an unprecedented opportunity to unearth new biotechnology. We combine experimental and computational approaches to search for unique and useful biomolecules. Our approaches include mining the world’s sequences, designing molecules from scratch, and characterizing molecular and circuit functions using scalable assays that leverage the power of high-throughput sequencing. We aim to harness these new biomolecules to address pressing challenges in medicine.

Publications

All Publications

Team

Felix Horns
Core Investigator

Felix Horns

Felix Horns is an Assistant Professor of Genetics at Stanford University. The Horns group works at the interface of synthetic biology and genomics to develop and apply technologies for monitoring and manipulating cells, with particular focus on the immune system and the brain. Felix received his Ph.D. in Biophysics from Stanford and performed postdoctoral studies at the California Institute of Technology. His research has been recognized by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface, the Chen Foundation fellowship, and the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation fellowship.

Contact Us

We are looking for exceptionally curious and motivated graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and research associates to join us! Our team is multidisciplinary and we are seeking individuals with backgrounds in biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, computational sciences, and mathematics. Email me at felix@arcinstitute.org.

Address

Arc Institute
3181 Porter Dr
Palo Alto, CA 94304
info@arcinstitute.org
Arc Institute Location