CARY — A discovery in the manipulation of cells is creating new opportunities, and challenges, in the fields of human therapeutics, agricultural improvement and infectious diseases.
A discussion of the disruptive potential of CRISPR, short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, was part of the North Carolina Chamber’s The Future of NC Forum: The Golden Age of Disruption.
A number of companies today are using CRISPR in research platforms with the goal of harnessing the power to rewrite DNA, said Samuel H. Sternberg, Ph.D., assistant professor of molecular biophysics, Columbia University, at the gathering of more than 200 state leaders at the Umstead Hotel in Cary.
Samuel H. Sternberg, Ph.D., assistant professor of molecular biophysics, Columbia University.
CRISPR and the Gene Editing Revolution
CRISPR is an adaptive immune system in bacteria that enables them to withstand invasive genetic elements like viruses. In recent years, scientists have harnessed this natural process to create tools that can edit genomes in everything from bacteria to humans.
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Sternberg explains it like this.
“CRISPR is like a pair of scissors,” he said. “CRISPR-Cas9 eliminates viruses by slicing viral DNA. When it slices, it triggers the rest of the virus to destroy itself.”
The use of CRISPR is growing rapidly because it is easy to use, inexpensive and can be distributed globally, said Sternberg.
“It is very quickly starting to reshape biotech industries,” he said.
Using CRISPR in agriculture improvement, scientists can improve disease resistance, increase productivity and enhance nutrition.
CRISPR also has the potential to reverse genetic diseases by repairing DNA mutations and deletions.
“We are a couple of years away from determining how well this is going to work,” said Sternberg. “Healthcare for certain genetic diseases will be transformed with this technology. We may be inflating expectation for CRISPR right now, but it takes time for treatments to be proven successful.”
NC Businesses Leaders in CRISPR-Cas9 Use
Last year, Swiss-based Syngenta, which has its U.S. headquarters in Greensboro and its Advanced Crop Lab in Research Triangle Park, acquired a nonexclusive license to use CRISPR-Cas9 for agricultural applications. Syngenta is using CRISPR-Cas9 in multiple crops, including corn, wheat, tomato, rice and sunflower.
Another North Carolina-based company, Locus Biosciences, is developing CRISPR-based products to target bacteria by irreversibly destroying their DNA while leaving the many species of good bacteria in the body unharmed. The company is a spin-out from N.C. State.
