Hit&Run – the Italian way to epi-editing

The San Raffaele-Telethon Institute in Milan has been a leading player in gene therapy for many years. Nowadays, Angelo Lombardo, Luigi Naldini, and colleagues are making news with epigenetic editing. Their 2016 paper in Cell on hit-and-run epigenetic editing is considered seminal work. The company they co-founded, Chroma Medicine, received substantial financing, as recently reported by Nature Biotechnology. Last but not least, the presentation given in May at the annual meeting of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy inspired a Science news entitled “Better than CRISPR? Another way to fix gene problems may be safer and more versatile.” In brief, they injected mice to silence the expression of the PCSK9 gene, lowering “bad” cholesterol levels for months

Four tips on epigenetic editing

Credit IGI

The epigenetic way to editing is hot these days. Here are our suggested readings to keep pace:
1) the basics of the tools CRISPRoff and CRISPRon are explained on the website of the Innovative Genomics Institute
2) Nature Biotechnology news on Chroma Medicine, a company pioneering epigenetic editors
3) The Scientist on resetting the DNA of rats to reverse alcohol damage (see also the paper by Bohnsack et al. in Science Advances)
4) the review discussing translational issues in epigenetic editing published by Huerne et al. in The CRISPR Journal.