Fig. 1

Concept of designer therapeutic cells. A Designer therapeutic cells. Cells express receptors that sense environmental molecules. These receptors activate intracellular signaling networks to produce various cellular responses. Such cell systems can be engineered to develop designer therapeutic cells that are programmed to sense disease-related factors and process intracellular signals to output specific therapeutic actions. B Advantages of designer therapeutic cells over molecular drugs. While molecular drugs passively diffuse into the body, designer therapeutic cells can sense and reach the disease site, control behaviors such as proliferation and differentiation, and produce user-defined therapeutic factors. These properties enable the specificity and autonomy of therapeutic effects by designer cells (adopted from Lim [1], with modifications)