Some of the best stuff we picked up around the internet
By: Karen O'Hanlon Cohrt - Jan. 15, 2021
Top picks
Editas Medicine announced this week that it has obtained (FDA) approval for the first clinical trial for EDIT-301, an ex vivo one-time autologous (patient-derived) treatment for sickle cell disease. EDIT-301 is the first CRISPR-Cas12a-engineered cell therapy to enter clinical development.
Researchers at John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK have used CRISPR to create a recombinant (bacterial) strain of Streptomyces formicae with 10x fold increased production of naturally-occurring formicamycin antibiotics. Next steps include understanding the mechanisms of action of these antibiotics, which are capable of killing the toughest superbugs in lab conditions. The work was published this week in Cell Chemical Biology.
US-based biotech startup Tessera Therapeutics announced that it has raised more than $230 million in its second round of funding. The company was founded just 2 years ago and is pursueing a new technology gene writing for the treatment of genetic diseases.
Sarepta Therapeutics and Genevant Sciences annouce new research collaboration to develop lipid nanoparticle-based gene-editing therapeutics. The venture will bring together Sarepta’s proprietary gene-editing technology and Genevant’s proprietary LNP delivery platform for several neuromuscular diseases including Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
Recent article published in Methods Molecular Biology presents detailed protocols for evaluating the specificity of CRISPR-Cas9 and related gene-editing approaches in cells using targeted as well as unbiased approaches which are able to identify off-target cleavage events throughout an entire genome.