Tyler Daniel, who graduated from Montezuma-Cortez High School as valedictorian in 2014, is reaching a new frontier in science.
Daniel is heading into his second year at Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he is working on a doctoral degree in chemical and biomolecular engineering, specifically working on genetic engineering.
Daniel attended Kemper Elementary and Montezuma-Cortez middle and high schools. He then attended Colorado State University and received degrees in chemical and biological engineering and in biomedical engineering.
At Rice, he now hopes to help people who can’t be treated with traditional pharmaceutical or medical means.
“I came here because I'm working on genetic engineering, specifically, developing tools for treating human diseases through therapeutics and editing people's genes,” Daniel said. “The motivation behind that is there’s a lot of diseases that people have that pharmaceuticals or medical interventions can't necessarily treat and those diseases are based in genetics. They have kind of a genetic predisposition toward it, and there are things that maybe people are born with, and we know they have it, but we can’t fix it. That’s really the reason why I decided to start pursuing this field.”
About the time Daniel was in high school, CRISPR/Cas Systems, a family of proteins found in organisms such as bacteria, used to destroy DNA and play a role in antiviral defense, was first applied to editing the human genome. This was the first tool that made the idea of genetic engineering a real possibility.
Daniel said CRISPR/Cas Systems – acronyms for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and CRISPR-associated proteins – fueled his interest in studying genetic engineering even more. Because it is fairly new, however, it isn’t ready for widespread clinical use in non-life-threatening situations, making the need for research all the more important.
“I think being on the research side is the most impactful to make the technology safer and more applicable to general clinical use,” Daniel said.
Daniel gave the example of people who suffer from sickle cell anemia, an inherited disease found mainly among Black people. A genetic defect in an abnormal and short-lived red blood cell (sickle cell) results in a deficient supply of oxygen, which can cause of variety of symptoms including dizziness, fatigue, jaundice, impotence and strokes.
“That’s a huge impact on their life, and blood transfusions and things like that can only do so much,” Daniel said.
With genetic engineering, Daniel said, scientists are learning how to rewrite a person’s DNA to fix the abnormality causing the anemia. Other genetic diseases Daniel mentioned were Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and other neurological disorders that have genetic components.
He also included atherosclerosis, heart disease and more.
In the example of sickle cell anemia, Daniel said researchers are finding that CRISPR-associated proteins can be given a guide that pinpoints the mutation in someone’s genes. From there, it can hunt throughout the cell after being injected into the body and fix the mutation.
“We program it to find a particular piece of DNA that is damaged in your body, and once we program it and send it into your cell, then it can go in and actually fix it,” Daniel said.
“It’s only 10, 11 years old,” Daniel said. “There’s so many clinical trials and tons and tons of research going on.”
To complete his Ph.D., Daniel said he has to add “novel, scientific information to the scientific community that no one else has done before.”
“You need to research something that no one else has and then publish a paper on it,” he said.
Daniel’s dissertation is on chemically induced dimerization.
“Basically,” Daniel said, “it makes it where these genetic editing proteins in your body are not active. And then when you add a small molecule drug, they come together and they’re active again.”
With Daniel’s research it would help with a current problem with CRISPR where the protein “edits things it’s not supposed to.”
Daniel’s research, which would hopefully deactivate the CRISPR protein after it fixes the issue in the body, would keep it from causing harmful effects from remaining active.
It was Cortez Middle School teacher Gary Livick that first sparked Daniel’s interest in DNA during a science class on that subject.
“In eighth grade, he was telling us about the human genome project and its completion, and there was some big advancement and I just thought it was super interesting,” Daniel said.
“He kind of explained that there’s this sequence of four letters in all of yourself and it’s basically billions of letters long … everything is related to these four letters that are in all of your cells. Everything that’s different from somebody else is related to this little code in your body,” he said.
“Ever since that lesson in middle school science, Tyler said that he wanted to be a scientist studying DNA,” said his mother, Wendy Daniel.
Daniel also credited former high school math teacher Susan Wisenbaker with sparking his interest in the study of engineering.
“She got me interested in the idea of going into engineering in general and gave me that mathematical background,” he said.
Daniel has also published a peer-reviewed paper in Current Opinion in Biomedical Engineering on his research into genetic engineering, specifically in the area of base editing with co-authors Hongzhi Zeng and Emmanuel Osikpa as well as his advisor Xue Gao. The title of the paper is “Revolutionizing genetic disease treatment: recent technological advances in base editing.”
The paper touches on the problem faced by CRISPR/Cas Systems after its conception in 2012, and how “all it was able to do was search for a particular part of your DNA and cut it.”
“That might help you as far as a disease or something if the protein isn’t necessary, but the issue with that is if you just completely knock out a gene, then its original function is no longer there,” he said.
Daniel’s article focuses on the base editor developed by a researcher in 2016 that switches the letter of a genome to a different one instead of cutting it altogether, known as a point mutation.
“Those allow precise control over what you’re doing inside the genome,” Daniel said. “Instead of just cutting, you can actually go in now and fix that mutation.”
Daniel emphasized that the support from his family and community helped him get to where he is today.
“Having the support of my community, family and wife has been so important to my journey to where I am today,” Daniel said. “Jeremy Yarbrough at Coldstone Creamery and Alex Cudkowicz at Cedar Diagnostics gave me some incredible tools that I use on a daily basis.”
