Bioartology
Since 2012
A New Technology
Gene Editing Technique:
CRISPR
ALICE PARK:
Dr. Carl June’s lab at the University of Pennsylvania looks like any other biology research hub. There are tidy rows of black-topped workbenches flanked by shelves bearing boxes of pipettes and test tubes. There’s ad hoc signage marking the different workstations.[1]
And there are postdocs buzzing around, calibrating scales, checking incubators and smearing solutions and samples onto small glass slides.[1]
Appearances aside, what June is attempting to do here, on the eighth floor of the glass-encased Smilow Center for Translational Research in Philadelphia, is anything but ordinary. [1]
He’s built a career trying to improve the odds for people with intractable end-stage disease, and now, in the university’s brand-new cell-processing lab, he’s preparing to launch his most ambitious study yet: he’s going to try to treat 18 people with stubborn cancers, and he’s going to do it using CRISPR, the most controversial new tool in medicine.[1]
Developed just four short years ago by two groups—Jennifer Doudna, a molecular and cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, together with Emmanuelle Charpentier, now at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin; and Feng Zhang, a biomedical engineer at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT—CRISPR allows scientists to easily and inexpensively find and alter virtually any piece of DNA in any species.[1]
In 2016 alone it was used to edit the genes of vegetables, sheep, mosquitoes and all kinds of cell samples in labs.[1]
Now, even as some scientists call for patience and extreme caution, there’s a worldwide race to push the limits of CRISPR’s capabilities.[1]
June’s ultimate goal is to test CRISPR’s greatest potential: its ability to treat diseases in humans. [1]
“Before we were kind of flying in the dark when we were making gene changes,” he says of earlier attempts at genetic tinkering. [1]
“With CRISPR, I came to the conclusion that this technology needs to be tested in humans.” [1]
Source:
The Crispr Pioneers
Science Meets Music
- CRISPR-Cas9:
A game changer in gene editing
| Emmanuelle Charpentier
- CRISPR-Cas9:
A game changer in gene editing
| Emmanuelle Charpentier
Bloomerg:
Feng Zhang, a 34-year-old molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Zhang was born in China and raised in Iowa, and he quickly became a star at Harvard and Stanford, where he was obsessed with finding the perfect way to reprogram human cells. “I’ve always been focused on genome editing,” he says.[2]
In 2011, the same year Doudna met Charpentier, Zhang attended a conference at the Broad Institute, in the same building as his lab, and heard a speaker offhandedly mention the Crispr immune system in bacteria. Zhang read everything he could find on the subject. He fixated particularly on a Canadian biologist’s 2010 paper noting the exceptional utility of the Cas9 protein.[2]
LINK:
How Feng Zhang's Gene editing technique
will change the world
- CRISPR
