Let’s start this week’s digest with a discussion of clonal expansion and mutations during cell and gene therapy development. Here’s the article that brought this to mind. Sickle cell gene therapy process may cause cancer-linked mutations in blood stem cells, Fierce Biotech. Clonal expansion This is a story about a non-CRISPR gene therapy using a […]
Some folks can view data from early, small clinical trials too skeptically or overly enthusiastically, and maybe that’s going on with some preliminary results from Verve Therapeutics. Good news? Bad news? I’m going to start with two articles about the same news that have very different vibes. What do I think? On the whole, I
Weekly reads: Verve Therapeutics, Casgevy UK OK, GDNF, MYC Read More »
What’s more important than Woolly Mammoth de-extinction research in the stem cell arena? Only maybe a 10,000 other things. Still, the mammoth de-extinction efforts capture people’s attention much more than the average research story. Mammoth De-extinction update Is de-extinction only a pipette dream? This startup has a big, expensive plan to find out, Popular Science.
It’s been almost seventeen years that I’ve been a professor here at UC Davis Medical School. It feels like home. I enjoy teaching our first-year medical students each year. Some end up doing research in my lab. Our school recently got a nice write-up over at STAT News by Usha Lee McFarling on the diversity
Weekly reads: UC Davis Medical School diversity, CRISPR, Parkinson’s Read More »
Where do things stand with potential applications of CRISPR and other gene editing technologies in patients? Overall, things are looking very positive. CRISPR human trials This week the third big international human genome editing meeting took place in London. The summit addressed numerous potential clinical applications. It was good to see the agenda included quite
Weekly reads: big CRISPR mtg, Mesoblast good news, Neuralink spiked Read More »
It’s always exciting when your lab has a new paper and my team just published a study knocking out the H3f3a gene in mice, which codes for histone H3.3 protein. We found that loss of this gene leads to lethality at a late stage of embryonic development. There were also indications of more specific phenotypes
Weekly reads: H3.3 on the brain, Texas bill, HSCs Read More »
When I first heard of CRISPR gene editing I was excited for my lab to try it out, but it seemed a long way from the field having even one CRISPR therapy available to treat human disease. In the Knoepfler lab, we study genetic and genomic programming in human development and disease. Gene editing seemed
Updates on CRISPR therapy development and clinical trials Read More »
Graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) is counterintuitive In the weeks and months following a transplant, a major concern is the recipient’s immune system rejecting the “foreign” biological material. But in GVHD, the opposite happens: transplanted tissue unleashes a horde of T cells that spark a cascade of inflammation, within 100 days. Typically, GVHD follows a bone marrow
Mesoblast MSCs Quell Peds GvHD; On Road to FDA Approval? Read More »
Making a CRISPR baby is a controversial idea to even propose now for many reasons, yet even after He Jiankui’s train wreck some people have seemed eager to try it including apparently a scientist whose name perhaps many readers here are not so familiar with in this context: Professor Hui Yang. ‘CRISPR baby guys’ Is
Heads up on Hui Yang, another potential aspiring CRISPR baby researcher Read More »
By Anna Everette The title of this article is partially borrowed from a fascinating Lightning Presentation delivered by John Doench of Broad Institute at CRISPRcon this year. In his talk, Mr. Doench pointed out how we’ve been looking up to this promising technology for a while now, hoping it will deliver the anticipated results (see
The Hope of CRISPRcon: Year 2, Guest Post by Anna Everette Read More »