Your missing links are here

Here is some of the best stuff we picked up around the Internet

Top Picks

• New York scientists decipher design rules for RNA-targeting gRNAs. With their findings, they predicted optimised gRNAs for the entire human proteome! The same researchers also applied the data to predict gRNAs for a New York strain of COVID-19.
• Interesting overview on the application of CRISPR to fight infectious diseases. Not surprisingly, the so-called new coronavirus (COVID-19) is in focus.
• More coronavirus news – CRISPR may actually become a fast and accurate diagnostic tool for COVID-19.

Clinical Trials

• The first in vivo CRISPR treatment in humans has taken place. In a landmark clinical trial for Leber’s congenital amaurosis 10, which is the leading cause of childhood blindness, virally-encoded CRISPR/Cas9 machinery has been injected directly into a human eye. More about the BRILLIANCE trial here.

Research

• Researchers at John Hopkins Medicine use CRISPR to make cuts around long tumour genes, paving the way for new tools to chart the cancer genome. Selectively cutting out tumour genes should reduce the need to sequence entire genomes, saving resources and speeding up the sequencing of patient tumours in the clinical setting.
• A new study from Boston uses CRISPR to find new therapeutic targets in the incurable muscular dystrophy facioscapulohumeral dystrophy (FSHD). Results from ex vivo patient cells and zebrafish models of FSHD are promising.
• CRISPR is used to directly edit the genome of patient-derived xenografts. Now that it’s finally possible to edit the genomes of such tumour models, we can probe drug susceptibility and resistance and learn a whole lot more about cancer through functional genomics.

Reviews and Round-ups

• Great research overview of anti-CRISPR proteins – inhibitory proteins that should facilitate the development of controllable and more precise CRISPR tools.
• Up-to-date review on multiplex CRISPR technologies – potential applications as well as challenges and experimental considerations are discussed.

• Round-up about women in the CRISPR industry.
• This brand new review discusses in vivo delivery of CRISPR therapeutics using adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors as well as challenges facing CRISPR therapeutics. In case you missed it, there was also a great review in February covering aspects related to the engineering of the AAV vectors.

Surprising News

• Did you know that squids can edit their RNA outside of the nucleus? Yep, new research finds that squids can actually edit mRNA molecules in the cytoplasm. This comes at a good time with the RNA-editing field about to take off!
• CRISPR documentary to air in US cinemas and Netflix this Autumn. Read more about it here.

Thank You for now - have a great weekend.

And if you have questions or suggestions, you can directly reach us at editor@crisprmedicinenews.com. We love hearing from readers!

(c; Rasmus

You can follow the blog on Twitter and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can sign up yourself here.