Tag Archives: Francis Collins

Picture of the week: Francis Collins’s bars

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Francis Collins at the ASGCT 25th Annual Meeting

“Your mission is to make the red bar match the yellow bar”, urges a slide shown by Francis Collins at the annual meeting of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy held in Washington. There are almost 7,000 genetic diseases, but only about 500 with therapy. Most are not viable targets in a for-profit setting and won’t be managed by current gene-editing procedures. Hence the call to find something that is scalable. “We need a transformative approach.” Please read Kevin Davies’s account of the inspirational lecture given by the geneticist that led the Human Genome Project, then was appointed director of the NIH, and currently is Joe Biden’s scientific advisor.

CRISPR antivirals, where are we now?

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CRISPR-based diagnostic tests for Sars-Cov2 are coming, as you probably know. But what about CRISPR-based antiviral therapy? It would seem a natural outcome for a technology inspired by the way many bacteria fight their viruses. Indeed this kind of research is being pursued in a handful of labs, using a CRISPR enzyme targeting RNA instead of DNA.

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Great progeria paper opens CRISPR new year

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A paper published in Nature by CRISPR innovator David Liu and a giant in medical genetics, Francis Collins, raises great hopes for treating a rare, devastating pediatric disease causing premature-aging (Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome). “The outcome is incredible,” according to gene-therapy researcher Guangping Gao. “Dance on the lab bench” amazing, according to editing pioneer Fyodor Urnov. Let’s be clear: the CRISPR variant called a base-editor has helped only progeria mice so far, but results are beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. One injection is enough to fix the single-letter mutation in several tissues, doubling mice’s lifespan. To learn more, see David Liu’s tweets and the NIH Director’s Blog.