Investigators from Whitehead Institute, the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have used CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology to identify three promising new targets for treatment of HIV infection. In their report receiving advance online publication in Nature Genetics, the research team describes how screening with CRISPR for human genes that are essential for HIV infection but not for cellular survival identified five genes—three of which had not been identified in earlier studies using RNA interference. Their method can also be used to identify therapeutic targets for other viral pathogens.
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