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2: Current Research Directions

  • Page ID
    41368
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    Improvement of Cas-9

    Recent research has produced a variant of Cas-9 that greatly improves the specificity of Cas-9, reducing the likeliness of offsite errors.

    Current research being done with CRISPR/Cas-9

    The recent improvement of Cas-9 has opened new pathways of research. For example, it can be used to analyze the functions of specific genes by using CRISPR/Cas-9 to remove just that gene and observing the effect of the removal. One example of an application of this is in the study of melanoma cancer cells.

    Vemurafenib is a FDA approved drug for treating melanoma, and has been shown to be effective on melanoma cells that have a V600E BRAF mutation by interrupting the BRAF pathway and inducing programmed cell death.

    Unfortunately, in many cases the cancer will become resistant to the drug by creating alternative survival pathways. CRISPR/Cas-9 can be used to determine the genes that allow the cancer cells to develop alternative pathways. By programming Cas-9 proteins to target every gene individually and tagging the proteins so it is possible to determine which protein affected which cell, it is possible to determine the genes that are required for survival.


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