UC-Berkeley to receive funds for gene editing research

The University of California-Berkeley has said it will join research funded by US Defense Department (DoD) to improve the safety and accuracy of gene editing.

The project is one of the seven announced on Thursday by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an agency of DOD responsible for the development of new technologies for military use with $65 million in funding, Xinhua news agency reported.

The team, led by UC-Berkeley, includes the University of California-San Francisco and the Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California.

DARPA said the project is aiming to develop better ways to insert gene-editing molecules, including CRISPR-Cas9, short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats Associated Protein 9, into living cells; explore applications of CRISPR proteins other than the popular Cas9, such as RNA-snipping Cas13a; discover more anti-CRISPR proteins that can be used to keep gene editing under tight control; and employ these tools in the fight against major viral diseases such as Ebola and Zika.

In addition, the team headed by UC-Berkeley's Jennifer Doudna, one of the pioneers who worked on CRISPR-Cas9, will investigate whether these tools might someday be capable of disabling bio-terrorism threats such as novel infectious agents or weapons employing CRISPR itself.

Phase 1 funding to UC-Berkeley and UCSF will amount to about $1.65 million over two years, with a potential additional two years and $1.64 million of funding.

As a partner in this effort, Sandia will receive funds directly from DARPA, under its Safe Genes programme.

Renee Wegrzyn, who manages DARPA's Safe Genes programme, on Thursday said "DARPA launched Safe Genes to begin to refine those capabilities by emphasizing safety first for the full range of potential applications, enabling responsible science to proceed by providing tools to prevent and mitigate misuse".

Echoing what Wegrzyn stated, Doudna, a professor of molecular and cell biology and of chemistry at UC Berkeley, said that "from a biosecurity perspective, we hope that our technologies displace less safe technologies, and by demonstrating that gene-editing activity can be prophylactically or therapeutically shut down, discouraging its potential intentional misuse".

The other DARPA-funded projects will take place at the Broad Institute and Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and North Carolina State University.

--IANS

py/vm