One idea for treating disease is to be able to program cells. Now, a major advance in synthetic biology allows for that kind of control that hasn't been seen before. The Institute for Protein Design designed and created LOCKR from scratch. It’s an artificial protein that could direct many different activities inside living cells, including being programmed to control a cell’s communication and traffic systems, its responses to its environment, or even the cell’s self-demise.

Scott Boyken and Bobby Langan explain the potential applications.