Switching to CRISPR-Cas Systems from Uncultivated Microbes

Report Highlights

CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) technology is currently the biggest discovery in life science. As a precise gene editing tool, it has been widely used in many areas with a great potential to treat human diseases. While some CRISPR-based therapeutic studies are moving to clinical trials, CRISPR's therapeutic promise was brought into question when some issues were found that could become major obstacles in moving the great genome editing tools to the clinic.

While many groups are actively resolving these obstacles, the significant challenges to minimize the immunological risks and avoid potential tumorgenicity have received more attention as big concerns for CRISPR-Cas therapeutics advancing toward the clinic. We believe it is timely to summarize and analyze the emerging immunological risk and potential tumorgenicity with the CRISPR-Cas systems, to predict how this exciting genome editing market will affect other related segments of the entire life science market in the next few years. We also hope our opinion could serve as a "crowd crystal" on those discussions in response to the issues, and bring a better market environment for the technology to be sharpened and advanced into clinical applications.

Report Includes

• Detailed understanding of the two major types of adaptive immunity to Cas9 proteins, i.e. humoral immunity and cell-mediated immunity
• Comparison of in vivo and ex vivo CRISPR-Cas9 therapy and discussion about clinical safety and probability to enter human clinical trials
• Coverage of technical areas such as protein engineering and metagenomic analysis as driving forces to new CRISPR-Cas system discovery
• A look into the oncogenic risks by CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing and studies on the development and implementation of genetic systems designed to toggle tumor suppressor genes off and back-on again