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A Gene-Sequence Swap Using CRISPR to Cure Haemophilia

Daejeon, Korea (Scicasts) — Sufferers of haemophilia live in a perpetual state of stress and anxiety: their joints wear down prematurely and they have bleeding episodes that feel like they will never end.   Their bodies lack the ability to make the clotting factor responsible for...
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Deerfield Management’s Jim Flynn on CRISPR, and that $550M new fund

Deerfield Management recently announced a new, $550 million healthcare fund that’ll direct its profits to charity – certainly an unconventional, and marketable, route for a large venture capital firm. I spoke with Jim Flynn, the firm’s president and managing partner, on how it plans to distribute its...
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CRISPR-Breakthrough discovery by accident

It was only in 2012 that Doudna, Charpentier and their colleagues revealed the first demonstration of CRISPR. “Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” — CRISPR for short. They designed molecules that could enter a microbe and precisely cut its DNA at a location of choice....
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Using CRISPR to investigate pancreatic cancer

Writing about pancreatic cancer always gives me a pang. My grandmother died from the disease over 30 years ago, but I still remember the anguish of her diagnosis and the years of chemotherapy and surgery she endured before her death. This disease is much more...
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Simple technology makes CRISPR gene editing cheaper

Some DNA sequences appear multiple times in the genome. Here, an RNA guide probe labels repetitive regions in the nucleus of a Xenopus laevis sperm. University of California, Berkeley, researchers have discovered a much cheaper and easier way to target a hot new gene editing...
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Can We Cure Genetic Diseases Without Slipping Into Eugenics?

On April 18, scientists at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong, China, published an article in the obscure open-access journal Protein & Celldocumenting their attempt at using an experimental new method of gene therapy on human embryos. Although the scientific significance of the results remains open...
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