CRISPR
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The CRISPR patent battle is back on as UC Berkeley files an appeal
The University of California Berkeley has filed an appeal in a heated CRISPR patent interference case that earlier this year ruled in favor of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Read More
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Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria — did your brain just explode?
In a new study published in Nature, a group of scientists at Harvard have successfully stored a GIF— yes, like a moving meme — into live bacteria (E. coli to be specific). It’s a weird idea, but scientists have actually been using the genetic wondertool known as CRISPR or “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” for data storage parlor tricks… Read More
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Synthego’s genetic toolkit aims to make CRISPR more accessible
We hear a lot about the potential and implications of the gene-editing technique CRISPR, but it’s not like just anyone can open up an app, pick a gene they don’t like, and build the molecular machinery needed to snip it out. That’s the goal, though, and Synthego is one of the companies pursuing it by creating a sort of ready-made CRISPR sandbox to start new researchers off. Read More
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Caribou Bioscience’s CEO on CRISPR’s legal and ethical challenges
Caribou Bioscience co-founder and CEO Rachel Haurwitz joined us onstage at Disrupt this morning to help unpack some of the myriad complexities around her company’s pioneering work in the field of CRISPR biology. The gene editing tool has been the source of tremendous excitement over the last several years for its potential to help science hack everything from disease to food supply. Read More
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Scientists have eliminated HIV in mice using CRISPR
An important breakthrough has been made in the eradication of AIDs. Scientists have found they can successfully snip out the HIV virus from mouse cells using CRISPR/Cas9 technology. Read More
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CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna shines hope on the future of genetic modification at SXSW
Jennifer Doudna, co-inventor of CRISPR Cas9 technology, or the ability to program genes using a special enzyme, spoke about the promises of this technology onstage at SXSW this afternoon. In a keynote today, Doudna noted that while this technology is very young (less than five years old), “it’s been deployed very rapidly for existing applications.” Read More
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Crunch Network
How Synthego’s founders went from a mission to Mars to a mission to cure disease
When an entrepreneur quits their job to found a company, you’re bound to hear the words “I want to build something meaningful. I want to have a bigger impact.” Well, if your job is building rockets for Elon at SpaceX, what do you say? What’s bigger than colonizing Mars? For the SpaceX engineers behind Synthego, the answer was helping cure all human disease. Read More
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CRISPR-Cas9 inventor Jennifer Doudna’s plans on moving forward, genetically modifying humans
The decision of who owned the rights to a hotly disputed CRISPR gene editing patent came down in favor of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard today so you’d think the mood would be sour at the University of California, Berkeley, the other contender in the case. But Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna tells TechCrunch this is a positive for her. “I’m actually delighted to know… Read More
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Judge rules CRISPR-Cas9 patents belong to Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT
Following a high-profile and very heated court hearing over ownership of the patents for gene-editing technology CRISPR-Cas9, judges at the United States Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Virginia, ruled today that the technology belongs to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, not the University of California Berkeley, STAT News first reported. This is a big blow to UC Berkeley… Read More
Latest Crunch Report
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Move over Cas9, CRISPR-Cas3 might hold the key to solving the antibiotics crisis
Researchers at North Carolina-based Locus Biosciences think they have a potential cure for antibiotic resistance using CRISPR’s lesser-known Cas3 enzyme. Most of the interest in CRISPR technology centers around the enzyme Cas9, which acts as a type of genetic scissors, allowing scientists to snip out, edit and replace DNA at certain intervals along the genome. However, Cas3 goes beyond… Read More
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Weekly Roundup: Facebook’s fake news, MacBook Pro reviewed, first human CRISPR-ed
Facebook’s fake news frenzy continued as the company came under scrutiny for its debated influence on the U.S. election, LinkedIn was blocked in Russia and a human CRISPR-ed for the first time. Also, the human species has about 1,000 years left according to Stephen Hawking. But do we deserve survival? The existence of Coca-Cola’s selfie bottle points toward no. Read More
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Chinese scientists CRISPR a human for the first time
A group of Chinese scientists injected a human being with cells genetically edited using CRISPR-Cas9 technology. This is the first time CRISPR has been used on a fully formed adult human and it’s encouraged a biomedical battle between China and the United States. The scientists from China are hoping the genetically edited cells will help their patient fend off a virulent type of… Read More
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Oral arguments for who owns CRISPR-Cas9 start next month
The date has been set for oral arguments to begin over who owns the patent rights to the gene-editing wonder CRISPR-Cas9. Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna and her colleague from the Max Planck Institute Emmanuelle Charpentier head to court on December 6th to face off against MIT’s Feng Zhang and present their argument before three US Patent and Trademark Office judges on why… Read More
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WTF is CRISPR?
Say you’ve inherited a rare genetic mutation that guarantees you’ll get a certain form of cancer by the time you reach 50 years of age. And that this is most likely how you are going to die. But what if I told you this cancer gene, passed down from generation to generation, can be snipped out of your genome entirely and you never pass it on to any of your offspring? Read More
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This is the CRISPR-inspired bio-terror drama we deserve, but not the one we need
CRISPR is like graphene. It’s one of those exciting new technologies science nerds will invariably invoke as a sort of game changer for every industry imaginable. And indeed, the gene-editing tool has already been unleashed on an impressive range of life-altering tasks, from the removal of malaria from mosquitos to a potential treatment for HIV. But there’s one job even those… Read More
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CRISPR loses Nobel to tiny machines
CRISPR, the gene-editing technology revolutionizing the biotech industry, has failed to take home the Nobel prize in chemistry for the second year in a row. Instead, the award went to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, J. Fraser Stoddart, and Bernard L. Feringa – three men who developed the world’s smallest machines using molecular physics. Each will share equally in the 8 million Swedish kronor… Read More
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Crunch Network
The ethics of transhumanism
While many of the ideas of transhumanism are noble, the field is accused of sharing traits with eugenics. I can’t answer the many ethical, moral and existential questions raised by transhumanism. All I know is that it’s inevitable that advances in robotics, bionics, AI and genetics will affect the next phase of human evolution — we shouldn’t underestimate the ethical… Read More
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Mushroom leather, tiny Zika detectors and lab-made breast milk debut at IndieBio’s third demo day
The accelerator’s demo day has grown so big we’re now live streaming it on TechCrunch. But it was just a couple years ago that the only pure biotech accelerator launched out of SOS Ventures. Many accelerators and venture firms have started to take a keen interest in the space since then, but Indiebio is still the one many look to in the industry for weird and interesting ideas like… Read More
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Jennifer Doudna, inventor of gene editing technology CRISPR Cas9, is coming to Disrupt
Berkeley professor of chemistry and molecular and cell biology and the inventor of the revolutionary CRISPR Cas9 gene editing technology Jennifer Doudna is going to join us for the first time on our Disrupt stage in SF this September. We’ll chat with Doudna about her discovery of a tool called Cas9 that not only is upending the biotech industry but could have a domino effect on… Read More
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