CRISPR/Cas technology helped revolutionize diagnostics and gene therapy

Reviewed by Emily Henderson, B.Sc.Apr 26 2021

Announcing a new article publication for BIO Integration journal. In this mini review article the authors Meiyu Qiu and Pei Li from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Republic of Korea summarize CRISPR/Cas-based Diagnostics and Gene Therapy.

Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) technology, an easy, rapid, cost-effective, and precise gene-editing technique, has revolutionized diagnostics and gene therapy. Fast and accurate diagnosis of diseases is essential for point-of-care-testing (POCT) and specialized medical institutes.

The CRISPR-associated (Cas) proteins system shed light on the new diagnostics methods at point-of-care (POC) owning to its advantages. In addition, CRISPR/Cas-based gene-editing technology has led to various breakthroughs in gene therapy. It has been employed in clinical trials for a variety of untreatable diseases, including cancer, blood disorders, and other syndromes. Currently, the clinical application of CRISPR/Cas has been mainly focused on ex vivo therapies.

Recently, tremendous efforts have been made in the development of ex vivo gene therapy based on CRISPR-Cas9. Despite these efforts, in vivo CRISPR/Cas gene therapy is only in its initial stage. In this review authors discuss milestones in CRISPR/Cas technologies that advance the field of diagnostics and gene therapy.

Recent advances of diagnostics and gene therapy based on CRISPR/Cas technology are highlighted and the strength and significant challenges of the CRISPR/Cas technology for its future clinical usage in diagnosis and gene therapy are discussed.