The Great Wave off Kanagawa revisited by Ryan Snook for Nature and by the street artist Santlov. Crispy holidays everybody, we’ll be back soon!
The Great CRISPR Wave
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Author Archives: Anna Meldolesi
CRISPR patents by numbers
According to IPStudies, over 12,000 CRISPR patent applications have been filed worldwide, falling into about 4,600 patent families. The number of issued patents is still impressive, more than 740 to date. More than half have been awarded in just two countries. Can you guess where?
China and the US, of course. Players dominating the patent landscape are the University of California and the Broad Institute – where CRISPR was respectively invented and adapted for genome editing in eukaryotes – the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the US company DuPont and the Massachusetts-based biotech firm Editas Medicine.
The struggle between UC and Broad over the standard Cas9 system is still on and is pushing the development of alternatives. CRISPR enzymes now come in approximately 50 different types, including Cpf1, C2c2, and CasY.
The partial score at the US and the EU patent offices is 34 patents granted to the Boston team and 10 to Berkeley. To learn more, read The Scientist.
Modulation better than correction. A new CRISPR paradigm is emerging
Another CRISPR step in the way out of congenital muscular dystrophy type 1A (MDC1A) is announced by Ronald Cohn and colleagues in Nature this week. This is still preclinical research in mice, but the indirect approach presented by the Canadian team holds great promise.
Continue readingSo many CRISPR books so little time
Rumors are spreading about upcoming CRISPR books by Walter Isaacson (best known for his biographies of Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs) and other best-selling authors. In the meantime biotech-bibliophiles are enjoying the satirical side of cutting edge research with How to Build a Dragon or Die Trying. Continue reading
Italy to edit quality foods
The research institute CREA is experimenting with CRISPR to improve Italian typical products. The project called BIOTECH is funded with 6 million euros from the Italian ministry of agriculture. Wheat, tomatoes, vines, fruits and more are on the menu, as reported by me in a 6-pages feature published in Le Scienze, the national edition of Scientific American. Continue reading
CRISPR slipping into disillusionment?
Influential author and broadcaster Adam Rutherford delivered a keynote at CRISPRcon2019, comparing the evolution of music with genetic technologies. The public attending the conference in Wageningen was asked not to record the presentation, but nothing prevents me from redoing one of his slides. Continue reading
CRISPRcon goes to Wageningen
After Berkeley 2017 and Boston 2018, CRISPR takes center stage in the Netherlands later this week. We’ll be there to hear about science, society and the future of gene editing!
