UC Berkeley’s innovativegenomics (IGI) recently co-authored a report announcing a new CRISPR approach shown to selectively destroy cancer cells. Inspired by a paper from the Doudna Lab on using CRISPR to shred repetitive sequences in brain tumors, first author and postdoctoral researcher Jingkun Zeng thought there might be an alternative to reactivating broken tumor suppressors: finding cells with cancer-specific mutations and eliminating them entirely. “People generally, and especially in the gene editing field, want to fix genes or knock out genes,” says Zeng. “But what I wanted to do here is completely different. I wanted to destroy abnormal cells, precisely and safely.” “Not only can this approach target the ‘undruggable’ cancers that we know, we can also easily and quickly adapt this to new mutations,” says IGI Founder Jennifer Doudna, a co-author on the paper. “This is an exciting development for cancer therapies, and potentially for other applications as well.” 🔗 Full story...