CMN Weekly (18 February 2022) - Your Weekly CRISPR Medicine News
Some of the best links we picked up around the internet
By: Gorm Palmgren - Feb. 18, 2022
Top Picks
The use of Type III CRISPR-based RNA editing for programmable control of SARS-CoV-2 is presented by researchers in the USA and China. The method, TEAR-CoV, leads to RNA-guided coronavirus transcript degradation both in vitro and in eukaryotic cells. Bioinformatics screening of gRNAs along RNA sequences reveals that a group of five gRNAs could potentially target 99.98% of human coronaviruses.
Synthego has raised $200 million of growth capital in a Series E financing. The financing will be used to further develop its Halo and Eclipse platforms and its next-generation technology CRISPROff. The company also announced that it recently appointed Avi Raval as chief financial officer. Mr Raval comes from a position as a managing director and founding member of the health care group at Perella Weinberg Partners.
Intellia and ONK Therapeutics have announced a licensing and collaboration agreement to advance allogeneic CRISPR-edited NK cell therapies for the treatment of patients with cancer. In the agreement, ONK will have non-exclusive rights to Intellia's ex vivo genome editing and LNP delivery technologies and exclusive rights to certain guide RNAs for up to five allogeneic CRISPR-edited NK cell therapies. Intellia will in return receive global co-development and co-commercialization options for up to two CRISPR-edited NK cell therapies with lead commercialization rights in the U.S.
CRISPR Therapeutics has reported a net income of $377.7 million for the full year 2021 and a cash position of $2,379.1 million. In a business update, the company reports that more than 70 patients have now been dosed with CTX001 for the treatment of beta-thalassemia and sickle-cell disease, that the first patient has been dosed with VCTX210 for the treatment of type 1 diabetes, and that other clinical trials are progressing.
Business Insider has published a narrative by Andrew Dunn about Shakked Halperin, CEO of Rewrite Therapeutics that was recently sold to Intellia Therapeutics for $45 million cash and an additional $155 million in milestones. Halperin founded the company in 2020 and raised just $2 million before selling it for potentially 100 times as much.
The employment of Cas12 and Cas13 in CRISPR-based disease diagnosis is the subject of a review by Indian researchers. The review discusses various advancements and the potential shortfalls and challenges in the widespread adaptation of this technology for SARS-CoV-2 and beyond.
A review of the use of new CRISPR tools in cardiovascular research and medicine is presented in Nature Reviews Cardiology by researchers from Stanford University School of Medicine. Among other topics, the authors discuss the prospect of therapeutic genome editing by CRISPR tools to cure genetic cardiovascular diseases.
A German review takes a look at the therapeutic applications of CRISPR-activation (CRISPRa) that are based on programmable recruitment of transcription factors to specific loci and subsequent activation of genes. The review discusses the currently available CRISPRa modules, recent developments, and future potentials and limitations of this approach with a focus on therapeutic applications and in vivo delivery.
Indian researchers review the role of the CRISPR-Cas system in cancer drug development and its application to biomarker identification and validation, high-end target genes, and breakthrough anti-cancer cell therapies. The authors also highlight the role of CRISPR-Cas in precision disease modelling and functional drug screening.
Meetings and webinars
The 4th CRISPR in Drug Discovery: From Targets to Therapeutics meeting will be held face to face in Cambridge, UK, 1-2 March. The meeting will focus on the application of genome engineering in the identification of novel drug targets through large scale CRISPR based functional genomics studies and developing advanced cellular and in vivo disease models for target validation.