Year: 2015

CRISPR topics are hot again now. Since the very beginning researchers found CRISPR sequences in December 1987, it has been widely used in many fields. The credit is obviously. But this year researchers reported that they had edited human embryos with CRISPR, which triggered an...

Cellecta, Inc., a US-based provider of products and services for gene function analysis and biomarker discovery, announced the launch of its pooled CRISPR guide RNA (sgRNA) knockout library targeting all human protein coding genes. CRISPR technology enables researchers to specifically and permanently ‘knock out’ a...

Researchers have successfully used the technique CRISPR/Cas 9 to cut and paste DNA into T-cells of the immune system. The method could lead to new ways to treat cancer, type 1 diabetes and viral infections as well as facilitating research into T-cell function. ‘Genome editing...

In a multidisciplinary effort, a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers has identified a protein that is integral to the survival and self-renewal processes of human pluripotent stem cells (hPSC). The UW-Madison team, which published its findings online in the journal Stem Cell Reports on...

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...

Novel design algorithm delivers an exceptional range of synthetic CRISPR RNAs and single guide RNA lentiviral particles for human, mouse and rat genes. GE Healthcare Dharmacon has launched today more than one million new CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing products using an advanced new algorithm to design...

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....

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...

Preeminent genetic researchers like David Baltimore, then at MIT, went to the Asilomar conference in 1975 to grapple with the implications of being able to decrypt and reorder genes. It was a God-like power—to plug genes from one living thing into another. Used wisely, it...