Be happy and CRISPmas on!
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MetaCRISPR, how to edit microbiomes
The best way to summarize the new metaCRISPR approach, recently published in Nature Microbiology, is the Twitter thread by Jill Banfield:
Continue readingCRISPR children, how are they?
Lulu and Nana are three years old. Amy is the name Nature Biotechnology uses to refer to the third CRISPR baby, born in late spring-early summer 2019. Their health is a closely held secret, that Vivien Marx has investigated for the journal’s December issue. “A full understanding of the health risks faced by the children due to their edited genomes may lie beyond the reach of current technology”, she writes. Despite or maybe because of that, the news feature is well worth reading. Below are a few points:
Continue readingBase-editing comes of age and more SCD news
The first Investigational New Drug (IND) application for base-editing technology has been cleared by the Food and Drug Administration. BEAM-101, developed by Beam Therapeutics, is an ex vivo base-editing product candidate, meaning that it uses a modified form of CRISPR capable of making single base changes without double-stranded DNA cleavage.
Continue readingWould you buy these apples?
Three scab-resistant apples resulting from conventional breeding at the University of Bologna in Italy. I got them yesterday from prof. Stefano Tartarini at a workshop on NBTs (New Breeding Techniques, also called TEA in Italy, meaning Assisted Evolution Techniques). I filled out the evaluation questionnaire on the red, the pink, and the rusty apple. The last question is: would you buy it if it was a TEA fruit? A big yes from me! (My favorite is the rusty one).
Drill & thrill, first CRISPR wheat sown in UK
The picture shows the first field trial of CRISPR wheat in Europe. Starting a couple of weeks ago, the trial will run for five years, with plants being sown each October and harvested the following September.
Continue readingFyodor Urnov imagines CRISPR cures
“Imagine CRISPR cures” is the title of the keynote by Fyodor Urnov at the World CRISPR Day conference on October 20. The talk was far from a celebration: “The fact that editing represents an approach to the majority of monogenic diseases in principle doesn’t mean that some biotech will take on disease number 823 in practice, and there are over 5,000 monogenic conditions on OMIM. Three years to IND in the best case scenario and cost scale of more than $6m per disease, that’s incompatible with either the promise of CRISPR to edit any given mutation which it can do or the unmet medical needs”. Don’t miss the on-demand video to learn more about the challenge of N=1 trials and Urnov’s call to arm against ultra-rare diseases.
Xenotransplantation: time to go deeper
And so it happened. “In a first, surgeons attached a pig kidney to a human, and it worked,” as the New York Times puts it. Data are scarce, however, and all the info we have is from the general media. The kidney came from a GalSafe pig, which is the only one FDA approved so far. But scientists from several companies have already developed pigs much more engineered than that (with three or four porcine genes knocked-out instead of one, and human gene additions). To get an updated picture, we highly recommend this article published in Nature Biotechnology last April.
CRISPR rap: cut out misogyny and elevate the sisters!
Meet the first CRISPR patients in Italy
Emanuele and Erika Guarini are brother and sister. They were treated for thalassemia respectively in November 2020 and August 2021 by the team of Franco Locatelli at Bambin Gesù hospital in Rome. Before the CRISPR-based treatment, they needed a blood transfusion every 15-20 days (source La Repubblica).
CRISPeR FRENZY 