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Find and Replace: DNA Editing Tool Shows Gene Therapy Promise

This image represents an infection-fighting cell called a neutrophil. In this artist’s rendering, the DNA of a cell is being “edited” with a pen-like tool to help restore its ability to fight bacterial invaders.

For gene therapy research, the perennial challenge has been devising a reliable way to insert safely a working copy of a gene into relevant cells that can take over for a faulty one. But with the recent discovery of powerful gene editing tools, the landscape of opportunity is starting to change. Instead of threading the needle through the cell membrane with a bulky gene, researchers are starting to design ways to apply these tools in the nucleus—to edit out the disease-causing error in a gene and allow it to work correctly.

How Asking a Very Basic Research Question Led Us to a Model For At Least 3 Diseases

When I started this project, it was not my objective to develop a model for any specific disease, nor did I even suspect that the ultimate result would be some insight into autoimmune disease. The basic research question I was asking was why there are sequences in the 3’ untranslated region of the interferon-gamma mRNA that are more highly conserved than the coding region of the gene.

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