You’ve likely heard of CRISPR. By now, you also may have heard that CRISPR has been used to produce a revolutionary new treatment for Sickle Cell Disease. Just 4 years after the Nobel Prize for the discovery of CRISPR was awarded, we have an approved treatment using this technology. This may have you wondering if this approach is being used in Huntington’s disease (HD) research and when a similar drug for HD might come to the clinic. Let’s discuss!
Genetic scissors transform science
CRISPR is short for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” – quite a mouthful! That’s essentially just science-speak for short strings of DNA letters that break up repeating parts of genetic code. These so-called CRISPR sequence interruptions were first noticed in bacteria. The unique strings of DNA letters which make up these sequences appear to have come from viruses, which scientists think might be part of an immune system that protects bacteria against viruses that they previously encountered.