Search Results for: doudna

Altos Labs: mission, leadership, jobs, & CIRM

Altos Labs

At the beginning of the year I wrote about a new kind of biotech called Altos Labs. It’s very different in some ways from other institutions. I find it an intriguing research entity. Where do things stand now with Altos Labs a few months later? More information, new ideas,  and questions have popped up in the …

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All about Altos Labs & its $3B cellular rejuvenation push

Altos Labs PIs

I wrote briefly a few months ago about Altos Labs. It’s a new kind of biotech institute that is focused on cellular reprogramming. Now we know much more and it’s clear this is a huge deal. What’s in this article What is Altos Labs? | Cellular rejuvenation | Reprogramming oldness | Challenges | Altos Strategies | Analysis of …

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Stem cell videos

Over the years I’ve done a variety of videos that ended up on YouTube. While most of these were stem cell videos, some deal with other important topics such as CRISPR of human embryos. We now also have a dedicated channel on YouTube The Stem Cell Channel. Check it out and follow for the latest …

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Unnatural Selection review: captivating mind-bender but needed more science

Unnatural-Selection-with-patient-Jackson-Kennedy

Today’s post is a review of Unnatural Selection, the new Netflix science docuseries focused on CRISPR and other disruptive genetic and reproductive technologies. The show is an interesting mix of personalities and stories from patients, scientists, biohackers, and more. One patient thread is the story of a wonderful little boy named Jackson Kennedy. He wants …

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CRISPR baby moratorium grows likely with rising tide of support including from biotech

CRISPR-gene-edit-vs-mutation-1

Trying to make a CRISPR baby any time soon would be a really bad idea. How bad? Last December 3rd I penned a piece for STAT News arguing for a moratorium on the heritable use of CRISPR in humans. This potential future, radical application of “gene editing” is now often colloquially referred to as “CRISPR …

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CRISPR update: lots of new pubs, news, & maybe a patent finale

Figure-1a-from-Akcakaya-et-al.-paper-Nature-2018

Sometimes it seems like a bunch of stuff in one area, like with CRISPR this week, happens all of a sudden in science. A bunch of fairly high-profile gene editing pubs came out. They generated a lot of news reports. Other news in this arena popped up too, all within a few days. In vivo …

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CRISPR, human genetic modification, & a needed course correction

coverGMO-e1498086048321

Are designer babies made using CRISPR or other genetic modification technologies closer to reality today? If so, what exactly should we do about it? Researchers can use CRISPR to genetically modify just about any organism or its cells, but targeting humans is the subject of the most intense discussion including using CRISPR in the human germline …

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Why UC Berkeley deserves the main CRISPR patent

statment_gene_editing-tech

Some months back a USPTO court issued a ruling that most interpreted as meaning the Broad Institute had won the so-called ‘CRISPR patent battle’ in the U.S. and that UC Berkeley, Jennifer Doudna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier had lost. Now this week Berkeley has appealed that ruling. It seems the odds are against Berkeley prevailing in its appeal, but frankly …

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Does Word Cloud of Lander’s Heroes of CRISPR Text Suggest Bias?

Lander-cloud-2

Eric Lander’s recent piece in Cell on The Heroes of CRISPR has sparked strong reactions that are mostly critical and have argued that the article is biased. I’m going to weigh in with my own thoughts at some point later, but I thought it would be interesting to try a word cloud-based text mining of the Lander …

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Patent expert weighs in on CRISPR dispute between UC & Broad

CRISPR-patent-dispute

The patent dispute on CRISPR between UC/Jennifer Doudna and The Broad/Feng Zhang has been the subject of major attention including in a recent piece on Stanford Center for Law & Biosciences Blog. There is a lot of confusion over this important CRISPR dispute so I turned to a patent expert for their take on this via an interview …

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