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Dr. Zelig Eshhar, A Founding Father of CAR-T cell Immunotherapy passed away on 7/4/2025

Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

Professor Zelig Eshhar
The Marshall and Renette Ezralow Professor of Chemical and Cellular Immunology

Weizmann Institute
We, the Weizmann Institute of Science community, deeply mourn the passing of Prof. Zelig Eshhar of the Department of Immunology and Regenerative Biology. Prof. Eshhar was a trailblazing scientist in the field of cancer immunotherapy, a recipient of the Israel Prize in Life Science, and an acclaimed researcher who dedicated his life to life-saving research. May he rest in peace.

SOURCE

https://x.com/WeizmannScience/status/1941025021343797452

Weizmann Institute of Science

A Tribute to Dr. Zelig Eshhar: A Founding Father of CAR T and a Pioneer of Medical Independence

Arie Belldegrun, MD   • 2ndVerified • 2ndCo-Founder, Bellco Capital Co Chairman, Breakthrough Properties Co-Founder & Sr. Managing Partner, Vida Ventures Executive Chairman & Co-Founder, Allogene Therapeutics Co-Chairman, Symbiotic CapitalCo-Founder, Bellco Capital Co Chairman, Breakthrough Properties Co-Founder & Sr. Managing Partner, Vida Ventures Executive Chairman & Co-Founder, Allogene Therapeutics Co-Chairman, Symbiotic Capital

This Fourth of July weekend, a time when freedom and new beginnings are celebrated, we mourn the loss of one of science’s great liberators, Dr. Zelig Eshhar. His passing is deeply personal to me and profoundly impactful for the field of cancer immunotherapy.

Zelig was more than a scientist. He was a visionary who redefined what was possible in cancer treatment. As the “father” of CAR T therapy, he broke the bounds of conventional oncology and empowered the immune system to do what it was always meant to do: fight cancer. His pioneering work on chimeric antigen receptors, which began at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and continued at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at the The National Institutes of Health under another cancer legend, Dr. Steve Rosenberg, M.D., Ph.D., sparked a revolution that now brings hope to thousands of patients worldwide.

In December 2013, Kite Pharma licensed the groundbreaking CAR constructs Zelig had pioneered, forming the scientific backbone of our mission. His trust in our team was instrumental in building Kite, and he served on our Scientific Advisory Board with the humility and wisdom of a true giant. I will never forget when Zelig signed his agreement with Kite and inscribed a 50-shekel note in front of Ran Nussbaum, a fellow board member, and I, to mark “a new beginning” for CAR T therapy. Though small in size, that note carries monumental symbolic value – a belief in a better future.

One of my most cherished photographs is from 2013, standing with Dr. Zelig Eshhar and Dr. Rosenberg, two visionaries who helped launch a new chapter in medicine. That image captures more than a historic moment; it marks the start of a true paradigm shift. I knew I was among giants, but I didn’t yet grasp how life-changing that moment would be. It was Zelig who first showed us how to combine the precision of antibodies with the power of T cells, creating a therapeutic approach that would redefine what’s possible, not just in oncology, but across the spectrum of disease.

The Fourth of July celebrates independence. How fitting that we remember Zelig on this day, a man who gave medicine its own independence from the limitations of traditional cancer therapies. His legacy is not just in the patents he held or the publications he authored, but in every patient who now lives longer, stronger, and freer because of CAR T cell therapy.

To me, Zelig Eshhar will always be remembered not only as a pioneering scientist but also as a quiet hero, a generous mentor, and a dear friend. We honor him not just with words, but with action, by continuing to build, to innovate, and to carry forward the mission he began.

Zelig, your vision endures in every cell, every cure, and every life saved.

Arie Belldegrun, M.D.

SOURCE – Text & pictures

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/arie-belldegrun-md-09b32b40_a-tribute-to-dr-zeligeshhar-a-founding-ugcPost-7347296758856675328-_fUV/?utm_medium=ios_app&rcm=ACoAAAABVi0BmYKOKsh70AIfmMVAHFSJ31jS2iY&utm_source=social_share_send&utm_campaign=share_via

Prof. Selig Ashchar – one of the fathers of immunotherapy research in Israel – has passed away

Israel Prize laureate Prof. Zelig Ashchar, who was head of immunology research at Ichilov, has died at the age of 84. “My real prize is saving lives,” Ashchar said before receiving the Israel Prize 10 years ago. Ichilov Hospital paid tribute: “Beyond his unprecedented scientific achievements, Prof. Ashchar was a guide, mentor and an extraordinary human being – dedicated to his students, his colleagues and to science.”

Yaron Druckman , Oren Reis, Or Hadar |04.07.25 | 02:08

Israel Prize laureate, Prof. Selig Ashchar of the Weizmann Institute of Science, who was head of immunological research at Ichilov Hospital and a pioneer in immunotherapy research for cancer treatment, passed away at the age of 84. He is survived by three children and grandchildren

Ichilov Hospital paid tribute to him: “It is with deep sadness that we at Ichilov Hospital say goodbye to the late Prof. Selig Ashchar – a groundbreaking scientist, Israel Prize laureate, and the one who served as the head of immunological research at Ichilov. Prof. Ashchar was one of the fathers of CAR-T therapy, a real revolution in the field of cancer research, which gave new hope and life to countless patients around the world. Thanks to him, Israel became a world leader in the field of immunotherapy, and patients who had no hope – were given a new chance.”

Prof. Zelig Ashchar upon receiving the Israel Prize in 2015

( Photo: Gil Yohanan )

Ichilov also said that “Beyond his unprecedented scientific achievements, Prof. Ashhar was a guide, mentor, and an extraordinary human being – dedicated to his students, his colleagues, and to science. His spirit and legacy will continue to inspire generations of researchers and therapists. We send our deepest condolences to his family, his loved ones, and all his partners in scientific and clinical endeavors. May his memory be blessed – and a light for the path of those who seek to change the world through science and medicine.”

Dr. Anat Gloverson Levin, principal investigator of the Laboratory for Immunology and Advanced Cellular Therapy using CAR-T at Ichilov, began her doctorate at the Weizmann Institute in 2006 under the supervision of Prof. Ashchar. In a post on the social network LinkedIn, she wrote: “I share with you my deep sorrow at the death of my legendary mentor, Prof. Selig Ashchar. Selig was not only a groundbreaking scientist whose invention saved many lives, but also an extraordinary, caring, generous, and endlessly inspiring human being.”

“I had the privilege of learning from him, witnessing his passion for discovery, and being guided by his wisdom and creativity. His ideas were always ahead of their time, and his dedication to science and his students was unparalleled. I have so many wonderful memories of our time together,” she added.

Prof. Zelig Ashhar was Professor Emeritus in the Department of Immunology at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and a recipient of the 2015 Israel Prize in Life Sciences. Ashhar was an expert in the genetic engineering of T cells, and was among those who laid the foundations for the clinical application of CAR-T technology that works against cancer cells. In 2021, he also won the Dan David Prize for his groundbreaking research that led to the development of dozens of medical treatments based on the revolution he led in editing T cells to attack cancerous tumors, and for laying the foundations, together with Dr. Steven Rosenberg, for the clinical application of this technology to fight cancer.

SOURCE – Text & picture

https://www.ynet.co.il/health/article/sjmkakssxg?utm_source=ynet.app.ios&utm_term=sjmkakssxg&utm_campaign=general_share&utm_medium=social&utm_content=Header

We, @PharmaceuticalIntelligence.com published several articles involving Dr. Zelig Eshhar research:

  • Economic Potential of a Drug Invention (Prof. Zelig Eshhar, Weitzman Institute, registered the patent) versus a Cancer Drug in Clinical Trials: CAR-T as a Case in Point, developed by Kite Pharma, under Arie Belldegrun, CEO, acquired by Gilead for $11.9 billion, 8/2017.

Curator: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2017/10/04/economic-potential-of-a-drug-invention-prof-zelig-eshhar-weitzman-institute-registered-the-patent-versus-a-cancer-drug-in-clinical-trials-car-t-as-a-case-in-point-developed-by-kite-pharma-unde/

  • Biomolecular Condensates: A new approach to biology originated @MIT – Drug Discovery at DewPoint Therapeutics, Cambridge, MA gets new leaders, Ameet Nathwani, MD (ex-Sanofi, ex-Novartis) as Chief Executive Officer and Arie Belldegrun, PhD (ex-Kite Therapeutics) on R&D

Curator & Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2020/10/15/biomolecular-condensates-a-new-approach-to-biology-originated-mit-drug-discovery-at-dewpoint-therapeutics-cambridge-ma-gets-new-leaders-ameet-nathwani-as-chief-executive-officer-and-arie-bellde/

  • Pioneers of Cancer Cell Therapy:  Turbocharging the Immune System to Battle Cancer Cells — Success in Hematological Cancers vs. Solid Tumors

Curator: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2016/08/19/pioneers-of-cancer-cell-therapy-turbocharging-the-immune-system-to-battle-cancer-cells-success-in-hematological-cancers-vs-solid-tumors/

  • Steroids, Inflammation, and CAR-T Therapy

Reporter: Stephen J. Williams, Ph.D.

Updated: 08/31/2020 (CRISPR edited CAR-T clinical trials)

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2015/09/14/steroids-inflammation-and-car-t-therapy/

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Prime Editing as a New CRISPR Tool to Enhance Precision and Versatility

 

Reporter: Stephen J. Williams, PhD

 

CRISPR has become a powerful molecular for the editing of genomes tool in research, drug discovery, and the clinic

(see posts and ebook on this site below)

 

however, as discussed on this site

(see posts below)

there have been many instances of off-target effects where genes, other than the selected target, are edited out.  This ‘off-target’ issue has hampered much of the utility of CRISPR in gene-therapy and CART therapy

see posts

 

However, an article in Science by Jon Cohen explains a Nature paper’s finding of a new tool in the CRISPR arsenal called prime editing, meant to increase CRISPR specificity and precision editing capabilities.

PRIME EDITING PROMISES TO BE A CUT ABOVE CRISPR

By Jon Cohen | Oct 25th, 2019

Prime editing promises to be a cut above CRISPR Jon Cohen CRISPR, an extraordinarily powerful genome-editing tool invented in 2012, can still be clumsy. … Prime editing steers around shortcomings of both techniques by heavily modifying the Cas9 protein and the guide RNA. … ” Prime editing “well may become the way that disease-causing mutations are repaired,” he says.

Science Vol. 366, No. 6464; DOI: 10.1126/science.366.6464.406

The effort, led by Drs. David Liu and Andrew Anzalone at the Broad Institute (Cambridge, MA), relies on the modification of the Cas9 protein and guide RNA, so that there is only a nick in a single strand of the double helix.  The canonical Cas9 cuts both strands of DNA, and so relies on an efficient gap repair activity of the cell.  The second part, a new type of guide RNA called a pegRNA, contains an RNA template for a new DNA sequence to be added at the target location.  This pegRNA-directed synthesis of the new template requires the attachment of a reverse transcriptase enzymes to the Cas9.  So far Liu and his colleagues have tested the technology on over 175 human and rodent cell lines with great success.  In addition, they had also corrected mutations which cause Tay Sachs disease, which previous CRISPR systems could not do.  Liu claims that this technology could correct over 89% of pathogenic variants in human diseases.

A company Prime Medicine has been formed out of this effort.

Source: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6464/406.abstract

 

Read an article on Dr. Liu, prime editing, and the companies that Dr. Liu has initiated including Editas Medicine, Beam Therapeutics, and Prime Medicine at https://www.statnews.com/2019/11/06/questions-david-liu-crispr-prime-editing-answers/

(interview by StatNews  SHARON BEGLEY @sxbegle)

As was announced, prime editing for human therapeutics will be jointly developed by both Prime Medicine and Beam Therapeutics, each focusing on different types of edits and distinct disease targets, which will help avoid redundancy and allow us to cover more disease territory overall. The companies will also share knowledge in prime editing as well as in accompanying technologies, such as delivery and manufacturing.

Reader of StatNews.: Can you please compare the pros and cons of prime editing versus base editing?

The first difference between base editing and prime editing is that base editing has been widely used for the past 3 1/2 years in organisms ranging from bacteria to plants to mice to primates. Addgene tells me that the DNA blueprints for base editors from our laboratory have been distributed more than 7,500 times to more than 1,000 researchers around the world, and more than 100 research papers from many different laboratories have been published using base editors to achieve desired gene edits for a wide variety of applications. While we are very excited about prime editing, it’s brand-new and there has only been one paper published thus far. So there’s much to do before we can know if prime editing will prove to be as general and robust as base editing has proven to be.

We directly compared prime editors and base editors in our study, and found that current base editors can offer higher editing efficiency and fewer indel byproducts than prime editors, while prime editors offer more targeting flexibility and greater editing precision. So when the desired edit is a transition point mutation (C to T, T to C, A to G, or G to A), and the target base is well-positioned for base editing (that is, a PAM sequence exists approximately 15 bases from the target site), then base editing can result in higher editing efficiencies and fewer byproducts. When the target base is not well-positioned for base editing, or when other “bystander” C or A bases are nearby that must not be edited, then prime editing offers major advantages since it does not require a precisely positioned PAM sequence and is a true “search-and-replace” editing capability, with no possibility of unwanted bystander editing at neighboring bases.

Of course, for classes of mutations other than the four types of point mutations that base editors can make, such as insertions, deletions, and the eight other kinds of point mutations, to our knowledge prime editing is currently the only approach that can make these mutations in human cells without requiring double-stranded DNA cuts or separate DNA templates.

Nucleases (such as the zinc-finger nucleases, TALE nucleases, and the original CRISPR-Cas9), base editors, and prime editors each have complementary strengths and weaknesses, just as scissors, pencils, and word processors each have unique and useful roles. All three classes of editing agents already have or will have roles in basic research and in applications such as human therapeutics and agriculture.

Nature Paper on Prime Editing CRISPR

Search-and-replace genome editing without double-strand breaks or donor DNA (6)

 

Andrew V. Anzalone,  Peyton B. Randolph, Jessie R. Davis, Alexander A. Sousa,

Luke W. Koblan, Jonathan M. Levy, Peter J. Chen, Christopher Wilson,

Gregory A. Newby, Aditya Raguram & David R. Liu

 

Nature volume 576, pages149–157(2019)

 

Abstract

Most genetic variants that contribute to disease1 are challenging to correct efficiently and without excess byproducts2,3,4,5. Here we describe prime editing, a versatile and precise genome editing method that directly writes new genetic information into a specified DNA site using a catalytically impaired Cas9 endonuclease fused to an engineered reverse transcriptase, programmed with a prime editing guide RNA (pegRNA) that both specifies the target site and encodes the desired edit. We performed more than 175 edits in human cells, including targeted insertions, deletions, and all 12 types of point mutation, without requiring double-strand breaks or donor DNA templates. We used prime editing in human cells to correct, efficiently and with few byproducts, the primary genetic causes of sickle cell disease (requiring a transversion in HBB) and Tay–Sachs disease (requiring a deletion in HEXA); to install a protective transversion in PRNP; and to insert various tags and epitopes precisely into target loci. Four human cell lines and primary post-mitotic mouse cortical neurons support prime editing with varying efficiencies. Prime editing shows higher or similar efficiency and fewer byproducts than homology-directed repair, has complementary strengths and weaknesses compared to base editing, and induces much lower off-target editing than Cas9 nuclease at known Cas9 off-target sites. Prime editing substantially expands the scope and capabilities of genome editing, and in principle could correct up to 89% of known genetic variants associated with human diseases.

 

 

From Anzolone et al. Nature 2019 Figure 1.

Prime editing strategy

Cas9 targets DNA using a guide RNA containing a spacer sequence that hybridizes to the target DNA site. We envisioned the generation of guide RNAs that both specify the DNA target and contain new genetic information that replaces target DNA nucleotides. To transfer information from these engineered guide RNAs to target DNA, we proposed that genomic DNA, nicked at the target site to expose a 3′-hydroxyl group, could be used to prime the reverse transcription of an edit-encoding extension on the engineered guide RNA (the pegRNA) directly into the target site (Fig. 1b, cSupplementary Discussion).

These initial steps result in a branched intermediate with two redundant single-stranded DNA flaps: a 5′ flap that contains the unedited DNA sequence and a 3′ flap that contains the edited sequence copied from the pegRNA (Fig. 1c). Although hybridization of the perfectly complementary 5′ flap to the unedited strand is likely to be thermodynamically favoured, 5′ flaps are the preferred substrate for structure-specific endonucleases such as FEN122, which excises 5′ flaps generated during lagging-strand DNA synthesis and long-patch base excision repair. The redundant unedited DNA may also be removed by 5′ exonucleases such as EXO123.

  • The authors reasoned that preferential 5′ flap excision and 3′ flap ligation could drive the incorporation of the edited DNA strand, creating heteroduplex DNA containing one edited strand and one unedited strand (Fig. 1c).
  • DNA repair to resolve the heteroduplex by copying the information in the edited strand to the complementary strand would permanently install the edit (Fig. 1c).
  • They had hypothesized that nicking the non-edited DNA strand might bias DNA repair to preferentially replace the non-edited strand.

Results

  • The authors evaluated the eukaryotic cell DNA repair outcomes of 3′ flaps produced by pegRNA-programmed reverse transcription in vitro, and performed in vitro prime editing on reporter plasmids, then transformed the reaction products into yeast cells (Extended Data Fig. 2).
  • Reporter plasmids encoding EGFP and mCherry separated by a linker containing an in-frame stop codon, +1 frameshift, or −1 frameshift were constructed and when plasmids were edited in vitro with Cas9 nickase, RT, and 3′-extended pegRNAs encoding a transversion that corrects the premature stop codon, 37% of yeast transformants expressed both GFP and mCherry (Fig. 1f, Extended Data Fig. 2).
  • They fused a variant of M—MLV-RT (reverse transcriptase) to Cas9 with an extended linker and this M-MLV RT fused to the C terminus of Cas9(H840A) nickase was designated as PE1. This strategy allowed the authors to generate a cell line containing all the required components of the primer editing system. They constructed 19 variants of PE1 containing a variety of RT mutations to evaluate their editing efficiency in human cells
  • Generated a pentamutant RT incorporated into PE1 (Cas9(H840A)–M-MLV RT(D200N/L603W/T330P/T306K/W313F)) is hereafter referred to as prime editor 2 (PE2).  These were more thermostable versions of RT with higher efficiency.
  • Optimized the guide (pegRNA) using a series of permutations and  recommend starting with about 10–16 nt and testing shorter and longer RT templates during pegRNA optimization.
  • In the previous attempts (PE1 and PE2 systems), mismatch repair resolves the heteroduplex to give either edited or non-edited products. So they next developed an optimal editing system (PE3) to produce optimal nickase activity and found nicks positioned 3′ of the edit about 40–90 bp from the pegRNA-induced nick generally increased editing efficiency (averaging 41%) without excess indel formation (6.8% average indels for the sgRNA with the highest editing efficiency) (Fig. 3b).
  • The cell line used to finalize and validate the system was predominantly HEK293T immortalized cell line
  • Together, their findings establish that PE3 systems improve editing efficiencies about threefold compared with PE2, albeit with a higher range of indels than PE2. When it is possible to nick the non-edited strand with an sgRNA that requires editing before nicking, the PE3b system offers PE3-like editing levels while greatly reducing indel formation.
  • Off Target Effects: Strikingly, PE3 or PE2 with the same 16 pegRNAs containing these four target spacers resulted in detectable off-target editing at only 3 out of 16 off-target sites, with only 1 of 16 showing an off-target editing efficiency of 1% or more (Extended Data Fig. 6h). Average off-target prime editing for pegRNAs targeting HEK3HEK4EMX1, and FANCFat the top four known Cas9 off-target sites for each protospacer was <0.1%, <2.2 ± 5.2%, <0.1%, and <0.13 ± 0.11%, respectively (Extended Data Fig. 6h).
  • The PE3 system was very efficient at editing the most common mutation that causes Tay-Sachs disease, a 4-bp insertion in HEXA(HEXA1278+TATC).

References

  1. Landrum, M. J. et al. ClinVar: public archive of interpretations of clinically relevant variants. Nucleic Acids Res44, D862–D868 (2016).
  2. Jinek, M. et al. A programmable dual-RNA-guided DNA endonuclease in adaptive bacterial immunity. Science337, 816–821 (2012).
  3. Cong, L. et al. Multiplex genome engineering using CRISPR/Cas systems. Science339, 819–823 (2013).

 

  1. Mali, P. et al. RNA-guided human genome engineering via Cas9. Science339, 823–826 (2013).
  2. Kosicki, M., Tomberg, K. & Bradley, A. Repair of double-strand breaks induced by CRISPR–Cas9 leads to large deletions and complex rearrangements.  Biotechnol. 36, 765–771 (2018).
  3. Anzalone, A.V., Randolph, P.B., Davis, J.R. et al.Search-and-replace genome editing without double-strand breaks or donor DNA. Nature576, 149–157 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1711-4

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New Targeted Cancer Therapy may be ‘Possible Hope’ for Some Pancreatic Cancer Patients

Reporter: Irina Robu, PhD

 

UPDATED on 7/18/2019

BREAKTHROUGH PANCREATIC CANCER TREATMENT PHASE III TRIAL OPENS IN ISRAEL

Hope is that successful trials will allow Rafael Pharmaceuticals will receive expedited FDA approval by late 2020.

BY MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMAN  JULY 18, 2019 18:30

“What it does is feeds misinformation to these regulatory elements, making them feel that there is too much carbon flow through both of these complexes, causing them to be inhibited,” Pardee said. “It simultaneously inhibits both complexes so tumor cells that are primarily driven by glucose cannot utilize glucose in the TCA cycle. Tumor cells that are primarily driven by glutamine usage cannot use glutamine-derived carbons in the TCA cycle. And, importantly, tumors cannot switch from one source to the other in the presence of CPI-613,” he explained.

He said that hitting two complexes simultaneously has many advantages. One is that the carbon source the tumor is primarily dependent on does not matter; another is that evolved resistance for both complexes simultaneously is very unlikely to happen.

Pardee said CPI-613’s key differentiators are that it is highly selective on the uptake and target level in cancer cells, which leads to less toxicity to healthy cells. This allows for patients to receive extended treatment courses and for the drug to be used in combination with other drugs.

CPI-613 is being administered in this clinical trial with a chemotherapy combination of fluorouracil, leucovorin, irinotecan, and oxaliplatin, called FOLFIRINOX.

SOURCE

https://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/Breakthrough-pancreatic-cancer-treatment-phase-III-trial-opens-in-Israel-596059

 

New Targeted Cancer Therapy may be ‘Possible Hope’ for Some Pancreatic Cancer Patients

Pancreatic cancer is the 12th maximum common cancer and the fourth leading cause of cancer death. The cancer is often difficult to diagnose as there is no cost-effective ways to screen for the illness. For over 52% of people who are diagnosed after the cancer has spread and with a 5-year survival rate.

Scientists at Sheba Medical Center in Israel developed a targeted cancer therapy drug together with AstraZeneca and Merck which can offer a possible new solution for patients with a specific kind of pancreatic cancer by delaying the progression of the disease. To evaluate the safety and test the efficacy of a new drug treatment regimen based on Lynparza tablets. The tablets are a pharmacological inhibitor of the enzyme poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase which inhibit the enzyme. They were developed for a number of indications, but most prominently for the treatment of cancer, as numerous forms of cancer are more dependent for their development on the enzyme than regular cells are. This makes poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase an attractive target for cancer therapy.

Their study included 154 patients who were randomly assigned to get the tablets at a dose of 300 mg twice a day with metastatic pancreatic cancer who carried the genetic mutation called BRCA 1 and BRCA 2. BRCA1 and BRCA2 are human genes that produce proteins accountable for repairing damaged DNA and play a substantial role in preserving the genetic stability of cells. Once either of these genes is mutated, DNA damage can’t be repaired properly and cells become unstable. As a result, cells are more likely to develop additional genetic alterations that can lead to cancer.

Patients with these mutations make up six to seven percent of the metastatic pancreatic cancer patients. The trial using the using the medicine Lynparza offers possible hope for those who suffer from metastatic pancreatic cancer and have a BRCA mutation and slows down the disease progression. According to the researchers this is the first Phase 3 biomarker that is positive in pancreatic cancer and the drug gives incredible hope for patients with the advanced stage of the cancer.

SOURCE
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-researchers-find-potential-hope-for-some-pancreatic-cancer-patients/

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Optimization of CRISPR Gene Editing with Gold Nanoparticles

Reporter: Irina Robu, PhD

The CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system has been welcomed as a hopeful solution to a range of genetic diseases, but the expertise has proven hard to deliver into cells. One plan is to open the cell membrane using an electric shock, but that can accidentally kill the cell. Another is to use viruses as couriers. Problem is, viruses can cause off-target side effects.

CRISPR-Cas9 is a unique technology that enables geneticists and medical researchers to edit parts of the genome by removing, adding or altering sections of DNA sequence. It is faster, cheaper and more accurate than previous techniques of editing DNA and can have a wide range of potential applications.

The CRISPR-Cas9 system consists of two key molecules that introduce a change into the DNA. One is an enzyme called Cas9 which acts as a pair of molecular scissors that can cut the two strands of DNA at a specific location in the genome where bits of DNA can be added or removed. The other one, is a piece of RNA which consists of a small piece of pre-designed RNA sequence located within a longer RNA scaffold. The scaffold part binds to the DNA and pre-designed sequence which contains Cas9. The RNA sequence is designed to find and locate specific sequence in the DNA. The Cas9 trails the guide RNA to the same location in the DNA sequence and makes a cut across both strands of DNA. At this point the cell distinguishes that the DNA is damaged and tries to repair it.

Researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center published new findings in Nature Materials suggested an alternative delivery method such as gold nanoparticles. The gold nanoparticles are packed with all the CRISPR components necessary to make clean gene edits. When the gold nanoparticles were tested in lab models of inherited blood disorders and HIV, between 10% and 20% of the targeted cells were effectively edited, with no toxic side effects.

The researchers use gold nanoparticles to deliver CRISPR to blood stem cells. Each gold nanoparticle contains four CRISPR components, including the enzyme needed to make the DNA cuts. But Fred Hutchinson researchers chose Cas12a, which they believed would lead to more efficient edits. Plus, Cas12a only needs one molecular guide, while Cas9 requires two.

In one experiment, they sought to disturb the gene CCR5 to make cells resistant to HIV. In the second, they created a gene mutation that can protect against blood disorders, including sickle cell disease. They observed the cells encapsulated the nanoparticles within six hours and began the gene-editing process within 48 hours. In mice, gene editing peaked eight weeks after injection, and the edited cells were still in circulation 22 weeks after the treatment.

Researchers at Fred Hutchinson are now working on improving the efficiency of the gold-based CRISPR delivery system so that 50% or more of the targeted cells are edited and are also looking for a commercial partner to bring the technology to clinical phase in the next few years.

SOURCE

https://www.fiercebiotech.com/research/fred-hutch-team-uses-gold-nanoparticles-to-improve-crispr-gene-editing

 

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Reporter and Curator: Dr. Sudipta Saha, Ph.D.

 

Leigh syndrome is one of the hundreds of so-called mitochondrial diseases, which are caused by defects in the mitochondria that produce 90 percent of the body’s energy. These disorders are rare; about 1,000 to 4,000 babies in the United States are born with one every year. But they are devastating and can result in grave impairment of nearly any bodily system. They are largely untreatable, uniformly incurable and very difficult to screen.

 

Leigh syndrome is a terrible disease. It emerges shortly after birth and claims one major organ after another. Movement becomes difficult, and then impossible. A tracheotomy and feeding tube are often necessary by toddlerhood, and as the disease progresses, lungs frequently have to be suctioned manually. Most children with the condition die by the age of 5 or 6.

 

Scientists have devised a procedure called mitochondrial replacement therapy (M.R.T.) that involves transplanting the nucleus of an affected egg (mitochondrial diseases are passed down from the mother’s side) into an unaffected one whose nucleus has been removed. The procedure is sometimes called “three-parent in vitro fertilization”. Mitochondria contain a minuscule amount of DNA, any resulting embryo would have mitochondrial DNA from the donor egg and nuclear DNA from each of its parents.

 

After decades of careful study in cell and animal research M.R.T. is now finally being tested in human clinical trials by doctors in Britain (no births confirmed yet officially). In the United States, however, this procedure is effectively illegal. M.R.T. does not involve altering any genetic code. Defective mitochondria are swapped out for healthy ones.

 

Mitochondrial DNA governs only a handful of basic cellular functions. It is separate from nuclear DNA, which helps determine individual traits like physical appearance, intelligence and personality. That means M.R.T. cannot be used to produce the genetically enhanced “designer babies” and thus should be allowed in humans. But, there is no way to know how safe or effective M.R.T. is until doctors and scientists test it in humans.

 

References:

 

 

The Three Parent Technique to Avoid Mitochondrial Disease in Embryo

 

 

 

 

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Stem Cells Used as Delivery Truck for Brain Cancer Drugs

Reporter: Irina Robu, PhD

Medulloblastoma, common brain cancer in children has been very difficult to treat therapeutically with traditional interventions which relies on surgical techniques to remove the bulk of the cancerous tissue. The researchers seen the need for novel treatments of medulloblastomas that have recurred, as well as for treatments that are less toxic overall. For this reason, data from University of North Carolina (UNC) Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center and  Eshelman School of Pharmacy published a study in PLOS named “Intra-cavity stem cell therapy inhibits tumor progression in a novel murine model of medulloblastoma surgical resection”, validates how cancer-hunting stem cells can track down and deliver a drug to terminate medulloblastoma cells hiding after surgery.

The technology in the research is an extension of a discovery that won researchers a Nobel Prize in 2012 and showed they could transform skin cells into stem cells. The research team started by reprogramming skin cells into stem cells and genetically engineered them to manufacture a substance that becomes toxic to other cells when exposed to another drug. Inserting the drug carries the stem cells into the brain of laboratory models after surgery decreased the size of tumors by 15 times and extended median survival in mice by 133%.

In this study, the scientists indicated they could shrink tumors in murine models of medulloblastoma, hence extending the rodents life. The approach holds promise for reducing side effects and helping more children with medulloblastoma. Amazingly the researchers also developed a laboratory model of medulloblastoma that allowed them to simulate the way standard care is currently delivered—surgery followed by drug therapy. Using this model, they discovered that after surgically removing a tumor, the cancer cells that remained grew faster.

According to the study investigator, Shawn Hingtgen, PhD, the cells are like a FedEx truck that will deliver cytotoxic agents directly into the tumor to a particular location. In earlier studies, Dr. Hingtgen and his colleagues showed that they could flip skin cells into stem cells that hunt and transport cancer-killing drugs to glioblastoma, the deadliest malignant brain tumor in adults.

Medulloblastoma is cancer that happens mostly in kids between ages of three and eight, and while current therapy has changed survival pretty dramatically, it can still be pretty toxic. The ability to use a patient’s own cells to target the tumor directly would be “the holy grail” of therapy, the investigators trust it could hold capacity for other rare, and sometimes fatal, brain cancer types that occur in children as well.

Source

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0198596

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Intestinal inflammatory pharmaceutics

Curator: Larry H. Bernstein, MD, FCAP

AbbVie Invests in Synthetic Microbes for Treatment of Intestinal Disorders

Aaron Krol    http://www.bio-itworld.com/2016/2/10/abbvie-invests-synthetic-microbes-treatment-intestinal-disorders.html

2.1.2.6

Intestinal Inflammatory Pharmaceutics, Volume 2 (Volume Two: Latest in Genomics Methodologies for Therapeutics: Gene Editing, NGS and BioInformatics, Simulations and the Genome Ontology), Part 2: CRISPR for Gene Editing and DNA Repair

February 10, 2016 | This morning, AbbVie announced a partnership with Synlogic of Cambridge, Mass., to create microbiome-based therapies for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The two companies have sketched out a suggested three-year timeline for preclinical research and development, after which AbbVie will take over advancing any drug candidates into clinical trials.

Drugs inspired by the microbes that live in the human gut are a hot topic in biotech. Companies like Seres Health and Vedanta Biosciences are pursuing the idea from a variety of angles, from making traditional small molecule drugs that interact with the microbiome, to creating probiotics or microbial cocktails that restore a healthy balance to the gut ecosystem. IBD, including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, is an especially popular target for these companies, thanks to strong suggestions that bacterial populations can affect the course of the disease. Already, Second Genome and Coronado Biosciences have taken prospective treatments into the clinic (though the latter has been dealt serious setbacks in Phase II trials).

But even among this peculiar batch of startups, Synlogic’s approach to drug design is exquisitely odd. The company calls its products “synthetic biotics”―in fact, they’re genetically engineered bacteria whose DNA contains intricately designed “gene circuits,” built to start producing therapeutic molecules when and only when the patient needs them.

“We are not looking at correcting the dysregulation of microbes in the gut, like other microbiome companies,” CEO José-Carlos Gutiérrez-Ramos tells Bio-IT World. “We have one bacterium, and it’s engineered to do different functions.”

Synlogic was founded in 2013 by two synthetic biologists at MIT, Timothy Lu and Jim Collins. (Bio-IT World has previously spoken with Lu about his academic work on bacterial gene circuits.) Gutiérrez-Ramos joined almost two years later, leaving a position as the head of Pfizer’s BioTherapeutics R&D group, where he had plenty of opportunity to turn emerging biotechnology ideas into drug candidates ready for submission to the FDA.

Still, synthetic biotics are a good deal more unusual than the biologic drugs he worked on at Pfizer.

His new company doesn’t quite spin functions for its microbes out of whole cloth. All the genes the company uses are copied either from the human genome, or from the bacteria living inside us. But by recombining those genes into circuits, Gutiérrez-Ramos believes Synlogic can finely control whether and when genes are expressed, giving its synthetic biotics the same dosage control as a traditional drug. Meanwhile, choosing the right bacterium to engineer―the current favorite is a strain called E. coli Nissle―ensures the biotics do not form stable colonies in the gut, but can be cleared out as soon as a patient stops treatment.

“We’re pharma guys,” he says. “What we want is to have pharmacologically well-defined products.”

The Molecular Circuit Board

Even before the partnership with AbbVie, Synlogic had a pipeline of drug candidates in development, all meant to treat rare genetic disorders caused by single mutations that shut down the activity of a crucial gene. In principle, there seems to be no reason that bacteria carrying the right genes couldn’t pick up the slack. “We know the patient is missing a function that is typically performed by the liver, or the kidney, or the pancreas,” says Gutiérrez-Ramos. “What we do is shift that function from an organ to a stable fraction of the microbiome.”

The approach is in some ways analogous to gene therapy, where a corrected version of a broken gene is inserted into a patient’s own DNA. “We don’t use that word, but the fact is it’s a non-somatic gene therapy,” Gutiérrez-Ramos says. “And if something goes wrong, you can control it just by stopping treatment.” The most advanced synthetic biotic in Synlogic’s pipeline targets urea cycle disorder, exactly the sort of disease that might otherwise be addressed by gene therapy: patients are missing a single enzyme that helps remove nitrogen from the body and prevent it from forming ammonia in the bloodstream. Synlogic will meet with the FDA this March to discuss whether and how this first product can be tested in humans.

Gutierrez Ramos

The new IBD program with AbbVie, however, adds a whole new level of complexity. Executives from the two companies have been in discussions for around six months, and both agree that no single mechanism will be enough to provide significant relief for patients. Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis are painful autoimmune diseases that involve both a weakening of the epithelial lining in the stomach, and a buildup of inflammatory molecules. The development plan that AbbVie and Synlogic have agreed on includes three separate methods of attack to relieve these symptoms.

“One approach AbbVie is very interested in is for our synthetic biotics to produce substances that could tighten the epithelial barrier,” says Gutiérrez-Ramos. “Another approach is to degrade pro-inflammatory molecules”―the same tack taken by AbbVie’s current leading IBD drug, Humira, which targets the inflammatory protein TNFα. “Finally, we can produce anti-inflammatory molecules.”

Uniquely, synthetic biotics can perform all three functions at once; it’s just a matter of inserting the right genes. But that alone might not be a decisive advantage over some sort of combination therapy. The biggest selling point of Synlogic’s microbes is not the genes they can be engineered to express―what you might call the “output” of their gene circuits―but the input, the DNA elements called “inducible promoters” that decide when those genes should be activated.

The core idea is that patients will have a constant population of synthetic biotics in their bodies, taken daily―but those microbes will only generate their therapeutic payloads when needed. In IBD, Gutiérrez-Ramos explains, “it’s not that the patient is always inflamed, but they have flares. Our vision, and AbbVie’s vision, is that the bacteria that you take every day sense when the flare is coming, and then trigger the genetic output.”

This would be a major improvement over a drug like Humira, which after all is constantly inhibiting a part of the immune system. Patients taking Humira, or one of the many other immunosuppressant drugs for IBD, are at a constantly heightened risk of infection; tuberculosis is a particular specter for these patients. If Synlogic can find a genetic “on-switch” that responds to a reliable indicator of IBD flares, it could potentially create a much more precisely administered treatment, while still giving patients the simple dosing schedule of one pill every day.

The company has leads on two inducible promoters that might do the trick: one that reacts to nitric oxide, and another tied to reactive oxygen species. Of course, there’s no guarantee that either will respond sensitively to IBD flares in a real clinical setting. “This is an early time for the technology,” says Gutiérrez-Ramos. “We have demonstrated this in animals, but we have to demonstrate it in humans.”

Although it’s far too early to say if synthetic biotics will become an ordinary part of the pharma toolkit, AbbVie’s decision to invest in the technology offers the means to test this approach on a large scale. Synlogic expects to raise its own funding for trials of its rare disease products, which the FDA does not expect to enroll huge numbers of patients, but IBD is a problem of a very different order.

“We are very honored to work with truly the leader in treatment of inflammatory bowel disease,” says Gutiérrez-Ramos. With the backing of big pharma, it will be possible to trial microbiome-based therapies for the kinds of common, chronic diseases that are the biggest drain on our healthcare system. What’s more, the AbbVie partnership is an important signal of the industry’s faith in synthetic biology as an approach to treating disease.

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Regulatory DNA Engineered, Volume 2 (Volume Two: Latest in Genomics Methodologies for Therapeutics: Gene Editing, NGS and BioInformatics, Simulations and the Genome Ontology), Part 2: CRISPR for Gene Editing and DNA Repair

Regulatory DNA engineered

Larry H. Bernstein, MD, FCAP, Curator

LPBI

 

New Type of CRISPR Screen Probes the Regulatory Genome

Aaron Krol    http://www.bio-itworld.com/2016/2/8/new-type-crispr-screen-probes-regulatory-genome.html

February 8, 2016 | When a geneticist stares down the 3 billion DNA base pairs of the human genome, searching for a clue to what’s gone awry in a single patient, it helps to narrow the field. One of the most popular places to look is the exome, the tiny fraction of our DNA―less than 2%―that actually codes for proteins. For patients with rare genetic diseases, which might be fully explained by one key mutation, many studies sequence the whole exome and leave all the noncoding DNA out. Similarly, personalized cancer tests, which can help bring to light unexpected treatment options, often sequence the tumor exome, or a smaller panel of protein-coding genes.

Unfortunately, we know that’s not the whole picture. “There are a substantial number of noncoding regions that are just as effective at turning off a gene as a mutation in the gene itself,” says Richard Sherwood, a geneticist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “Exome sequencing is not going to be a good proxy for what genes are working.”

Sherwood studies regulatory DNA, the vast segment of the genome that governs which genes are turned on or off in any cell at a given time. It’s a confounding area of genetics; we don’t even know how much of the genome is made up of these regulatory elements. While genes can be recognized by the presence of “start” and “stop” codons―sequences of three DNA letters that tell the cell’s molecular machinery which stretches of DNA to transcribe into RNA, and eventually into protein―there are no definite signs like this for regulatory DNA.

Instead, studies to discover new regulatory elements have been somewhat trial-and-error. If you suspect a gene’s activity might be regulated by a nearby DNA element, you can inhibit that element in a living cell, and see if your gene shuts down with it.

With these painstaking experiments, scientists can slowly work their way through potential regulatory regions―but they can’t sweep across the genome with the kind of high-throughput testing that other areas of genetics thrive on. “Previously, you couldn’t do these sorts of tests in a large form, like 4,000 of them at once,” says David Gifford, a computational biologist at MIT. “You would really need to have a more hypothesis-directed methodology.”

Recently, Gifford and Sherwood collaborated on a paper, published in Nature Biotechnology, which presents a new method for testing thousands of DNA loci for regulatory activity at once. Their assay, called MERA (multiplexed editing regulatory assay), is built on the recent technology boom in CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, which lets scientists quickly and easily cut specific sequences of DNA out of the genome.

So far, their team, including lead author Nisha Rajagopal from Gifford’s lab, has used MERA to study the regulation of four genes involved in the development of embryonic stem cells. Already, the results have defied the accepted wisdom about regulatory DNA. Many areas of the genome flagged by MERA as important factors in gene expression do not fall into any known categories of regulatory elements, and would likely never have been tested with previous-generation methods.

“Our approach allows you to look away from the lampposts,” says Sherwood. “The more unbiased you can be, the more we’ll actually know.”

A New Kind of CRISPR Screen

In the past three years, CRISPR-Cas9 experiments have taken all areas of molecular biology by storm, and Sherwood and Gifford are far from the first to use the technology to run large numbers of tests in parallel. CRISPR screens are an excellent way to learn which genes are involved in a cellular process, like tumor growth or drug resistance. In these assays, scientists knock out entire genes, one by one, and see what happens to cells without them.

This kind of CRISPR screen, however, operates on too small a scale to study the regulatory genome. For each gene knocked out in a CRISPR screen, you have to engineer a strain of virus to deliver a “guide RNA” into the cellular genome, showing the vicelike Cas9 molecule which DNA region to cut. That works well if you know exactly where a gene lies and only need to cut it once—but in a high-throughput regulatory test, you would want to blanket vast stretches of DNA with cuts, not knowing which areas will turn out to contain regulatory elements. Creating a new virus for each of these cuts is hugely impractical.

The insight behind MERA is that, with the right preparation, most of the genetic engineering can be done in advance. Gifford and Sherwood’s team used a standard viral vector to put a “dummy” guide RNA sequence, one that wouldn’t tell Cas9 to cut anything, into an embryonic stem cell’s genome. Then they grew plenty of cells with this prebuilt CRISPR system inside, and attacked each one with a Cas9 molecule targeted to the dummy sequence, chopping out the fake guide.

Normally, the result would just be a gap in the CRISPR system where the guide once was. But along with Cas9, the researchers also exposed the cells to new, “real” guide RNA sequences. Through a DNA repair mechanism called homologous recombination, the cells dutifully patched over the gaps with new guides, whose sequences were very similar to the missing dummy code. At the end of the process, each cell had a unique guide sequence ready to make cuts at a specific DNA locus—just like in a standard CRISPR screen, but with much less hands-on engineering.

By using a large enough library of guide RNA molecules, a MERA screen can include thousands of cuts that completely tile a broad region of the genome, providing an agnostic look at anywhere regulatory elements might be hiding. “It’s a lot easier [than a typical CRISPR screen],” says Sherwood. “The day the library comes in, you just perform one PCR reaction, and the cells do the rest of the work.”

In the team’s first batch of MERA screens, they created almost 4,000 guide RNAs for each gene they studied, covering roughly 40,000 DNA bases of the “cis-regulatory region,” or the area surrounding the gene where most regulatory elements are thought to lie. It’s unclear just how large any gene’s cis-regulatory region is, but 40,000 bases is a big leap from the highly targeted assays that have come before.

“We’re now starting to do follow-up studies where we increase the number of guide RNAs,” Sherwood adds. “Eventually, what you’d like is to be able to tile an entire chromosome.”

Far From the Lampposts

Sherwood and Gifford tried to focus their assays on regions that would be rich in regulatory elements. To that end, they made sure their guide RNAs covered parts of the genome with well-known signs of regulatory activity, like histone markers and transcription factor binding sites. For many of these areas, Cas9 cuts did, in fact, shut down gene expression in the MERA screens.

But the study also targeted regions around each gene that were empty of any known regulatory features. “We tiled some other regions that we thought might serve as negative controls,” explains Gifford. “But they turned out not to be negative at all.”

The study’s most surprising finding was that several cuts to seemingly random areas of the genome caused genes to become nonfunctional. The authors named these DNA regions “unmarked regulatory elements,” or UREs. They were especially prevalent around the genes Tdgf1 and Zfp42, and in many cases, seemed to be every bit as necessary to gene activity as more predictable hits on the MERA screen.

These results caught the researchers so off guard that it was natural to wonder if MERA screens are prone to false positives. Yet follow-up experiments strongly supported the existence of UREs. Switching the guide RNAs from aTdgf1 MERA screen and a Zfp42 screen, for example, produced almost no positive results: the UREs’ regulatory effects were indeed specific to the genes near them.

In a more specific test, the researchers chose a particular URE connected to Tdgf1, and cut it out of a brand new population of cells for a closer look. “We showed that, if we deleted that region from the genome, the cells lost expression of the gene,” says Sherwood. “And then when we put it back in, the gene became expressed again. Which was good proof to us that the URE itself was responsible.”

From these results, it seems likely that follow-up MERA screens will find even more unknown stretches of regulatory DNA. Gifford and Sherwood’s experiments didn’t try to cover as much ground around their target genes as they might have, because the researchers assumed that MERA would mostly confirm what was already known. At best, they hoped MERA would rule out some suspected regulatory regions, and help show which regulatory elements have the biggest effect on gene expression.

“We tended to prioritize regions that had been known before,” Sherwood says. “Unfortunately, in the end, our datasets weren’t ideally suited to discovering these UREs.”

Getting to Basic Principles

MERA could open up huge swaths of the regulatory genome to investigation. Compared to an ordinary CRISPR screen, says Sherwood, “there’s only upside,” as MERA is cheaper, easier, and faster to run.

Still, interpreting the results is not trivial. Like other CRISPR screens, MERA makes cuts at precise points in the genome, but does not tell cells to repair those cuts in any particular way. As a result, a population of cells all carrying the same guide RNA can have a huge variety of different gaps and scars in their genomes, typically deletions in the range of 10 to 100 bases long. Gifford and Sherwood created up to 100 cells for each of their guides, and sometimes found that gene expression was affected in some but not all of them; only sequencing the genomes of their mutated cells could reveal exactly what changes had been made.

By repeating these experiments many times, and learning which mutations affect gene expression, it will eventually be possible to pin down the exact DNA bases that make up each regulatory element. Future studies might even be able to distinguish between regulatory elements with small and large effects on gene expression. In Gifford and Sherwood’s MERA screens, the target genes were altered to produce a green fluorescent protein, so the results were read in terms of whether cells gave off fluorescent light. But a more precise, though expensive, approach would be to perform RNA sequencing, to learn which cuts reduced the cell’s ability to transcribe a gene into RNA, and by how much.

A MERA screen offers a rich volume of data on the behavior of the regulatory genome. Yet, as with so much else in genetics, there are few robust principles to let scientists know where they should be focusing their efforts. Histone markers provide only a very rough sketch of regulatory elements, often proving to be red herrings on closer examination. And the existence of UREs, if confirmed by future experiments, shows that we don’t yet even know which areas of the genome to rule out in the hunt for regulatory regions.

“Every dataset we get comes closer and closer to computational principles that let us predict these regions,” says Sherwood. As more studies are conducted, patterns may emerge in the DNA sequences of regulatory elements that link UREs together, or reveal which histone markers truly point toward regulatory effects. There might also be functional clues hidden in these sequences, hinting at what is happening on a molecular level as regulatory elements turn genes on and off in the course of a cell’s development.

For now, however, the data is still rough and disorganized. For better and for worse, high-throughput tools like MERA are becoming the foundation for most discoveries in genetics—and that means there is a lot more work to do before the regulatory genome begins to come into focus.

CORRECTED 2/9/16: Originally, this story incorrectly stated that only certain cell types could be assayed with MERA for reasons related to homologous recombination. In fact, the authors see no reason MERA could not be applied to any in vitro cell line, and hope to perform screens in a wide range of cell types. The text has been edited to correct the error.

 

 

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Molecular On/Off Switches in Bacterial Design

Larry H. Bernstein, MD, FCAP, Curator

LPBI

 

Controlling Synthetic Bacteria

“Kill switches” ensure that genetically engineered bacteria survive only in certain environmental conditions.

By Kate Yandell | Dec 7, 2015   http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/44715/title/Controlling-Synthetic-Bacteria/

http://www.the-scientist.com/images/News/December2015/620ecoli.jpg

FLICKR, NIAID

Two synthetic gene circuits allow researchers to keep genetically engineered (GE) microbes alive only under specific conditions, and to kill them when their services are no longer needed. The circuits, described today (December 7) in Nature Chemical Biology,could help pave the path to safe diagnostics, therapies, or environmental remediation strategies that rely on GE bacteria.

“This is yet another step forward towards better biosafety and biocontainment based on certain aspects of existing technology,” said Guy-Bart Stan, a synthetic biologist at Imperial College London who was not involved in the study.

Study coauthor James Collins, a synthetic biologist at MIT, began to design these gene circuits, or “kill switches,” after becoming interested in using GE microbes for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. “We were motivated to begin working on the topic as synthetic biology has moved increasingly toward real-world applications,” Collins told The Scientist. Other groups are working to engineer microbes for bioremediation and industrial processes, among other things.

But with genetic modification comes the concern that scientists will create new and uncontrollable species that outcompete or share their genes with wild-type organisms, permanently altering the environment or endangering people’s health.

Earlier this year, two research teams led by Yale bioengineer Farren Isaacs and Harvard geneticist George Church showed that they could genetically modify Escherichia coli to incorporate synthetic amino acids into essential proteins. When the bacteria are not fed the amino acids, they cannot produce these essential proteins, and so they die. This strategy yields bacteria that are very unlikely to survive without support from scientists but requires intensive engineering of the bacterial genome. (See “GMO ‘Kill Switches,’” The Scientist, January 2015.)

In contrast, Collins and his colleagues set out to create kill switches that could work in a more diverse range of microbes. “Our circuit-based safeguards can be conveniently transferred to different bacterial strains without modifying the target cell’s genome,” he wrote in an email.

First, Collins and his colleagues generated a kill switch called “Deadman,” named for a locomotive braking system in which the train will only run if the engineer is affirmatively holding down a pedal. In the microbial version of Deadman, a researcher must feed bacteria a substance called anhydrotetracycline at all times, or else the microbes will express a toxin and self-destruct.

The researchers generated a genetic circuit containing genes for the proteins LacI and TetR, a toxin that is only expressed in the absence of LacI, and a protease that degrades LacI. Under normal circumstances, TetR is preferentially expressed over LacI. TetR expression also triggers expression of the protease, which degrades any LacI that has been expressed. Without LacI, cells express the toxin and die. But when the cells are fed anhydrotetracycline, TetR is inhibited and LacI is expressed. LacI represses the toxin and keeps the cells alive.

Other versions of the Deadman circuit can be designed to degrade essential proteins in the absence of anhydrotetracycline, said Collins.

A second kill switch, “Passcode,” similarly requires that researchers maintain a specific environment for cells lest they express a toxin. Passcode requires a combination of input molecules for cells to survive. The system relies on hybrid transcription factors, each with one component that recognizes a specific DNA sequence, and one component that is sensitive to specific small molecules, such as galactose or cellobiose. One hybrid transcription factor, factor C, turns off expression of a toxin. Two other hybrid transcription factors, factors A and B, suppress expression of factor C. But specific small molecules can keep them from interacting with C. Another small molecule could prevent C from repressing the toxin. Therefore, to keep the cells alive, researchers must provide them with two small molecules that keep factors A and B in check, and make sure not to give them a third small molecule that will interfere with C.

Scientists designing Passcode kill-switches could make hybrid transcription factors respond to whatever combination of small molecules they desired, said Collins. “The strength of our kill switches lies in their flexibility and their ability to detect complex environmental signals for biocontainment.” He noted that companies hoping to keep others from using their cells could keep the recipe for their feed a secret.

“The great advantage is that you can effectively scale this and create different combinations of environments that contain different cocktails of these small molecules, thereby allowing you to effectively create a suite of cells that are going to be viable in different environments,” said Isaacs.

But Church warned that Collins’s circuit-based approach might not as effectively contain bacteria as an amino acid-based method, like one his group developed, since the cells are not fundamentally dependent on foreign biology to survive.

“If you need to have the ability to really scale your containment across a number of different species, then I could see the Passcode kill switches would be incredibly valuable,” said Isaacs. “If you are very concerned about escape frequencies and your degree of biocontainment, maybe you’d opt for something where the organism has been recoded and it relies on a synthetic amino acid.”

Still, Stan said the new paper is a demonstration that creating easy-to-insert kill switches based on genetic circuits is feasible. “I think what they wanted to show in the paper is basically that using some existing genetic circuitry . . .  you can obtain biosafety for the here and now.”

 

C.T.Y. Chan et al., “‘Deadman’ and ‘Passcode’ microbial kill switches for bacterial containment,” Nature Chemical Biology, doi:10.1038/nchembio.1979, 2015.  

Tags   synthetic biology, microbes, genetic engineering and biosafety

 

GMO “Kill Switches”

Scientists design bacteria reliant upon synthetic amino acids to contain genetically modified organisms.

By Kerry Grens | Jan 21, 2015   http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/41954/title/GMO–Kill-Switches-/

One of the biggest concerns about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is that they can infiltrate wild populations and spread their altered genes among naturally occurring species. In Nature today (January 21), two groups present a new method of containing GMOs: by making some of their essential proteins reliant upon synthetic amino acids not found outside of the laboratory.

“What really makes this a valuable step change is that kill switches beforehand were very susceptible to mutation or other conditions, such as metabolic cross feeding, from basically inactivating them,” said Tom Ellis, a synthetic biologist at Imperial College London who was not involved in the studies. The new approach circumvents some of those problems by making it extremely unlikely for the genetically modified bacteria to be able to survive outside of the conditions dictated by their custom-designed genomes.

Both research teams—one led by George Church at Harvard Medical School and the other by Farren Isaacsat Yale University—based their work on so-called genetically recoded organisms (GROs), bacterial genomes that have had all instances of a particular codon replaced by another. Church and Isaacs, along with their colleagues, had previously developed this concept in collaboration. Since then, their respective groups designed the replacement codons to incorporate a synthetic amino acid, and engineered proteins essential to the organism to rely upon the artificial amino acid for proper function.

“Here, for the first time, we’re showing that we’re able to engineer a dependency on synthetic biochemical building blocks for these proteins,” Isaacs told reporters during a conference call.

Both teams found that the cells perished in environments lacking the synthetic amino acid. Although the technology is not ready for industrial-scale deployment, the scientists suggested that such an approach could be applied as a safeguard against the escape of GMOs.

…..

 

‘Deadman’ and ‘Passcode’ microbial kill switches for bacterial containment

Clement T Y ChanJeong Wook LeeD Ewen CameronCaleb J Bashor & James J Collins

Nature Chemical Biology(2015)            http://dx.doi.org:/10.1038/nchembio.1979

Figure 2: The fail-safe mechanism for Deadman circuit activation.

The fail-safe mechanism for Deadman circuit activation.

http://www.nature.com/nchembio/journal/vaop/ncurrent/carousel/nchembio.1979-F2.jpg

To demonstrate active control over host cell viability, cells grown under survival conditions (with ATc) were exposed to 1 mM IPTG to directly induce EcoRI and mf-Lon expression. Cell viability was measured by CFU count and is displayed…

 

Biocontainment systems that couple environmental sensing with circuit-based control of cell viability could be used to prevent escape of genetically modified microbes into the environment. Here we present two engineered safeguard systems known as the ‘Deadman’ and ‘Passcode’ kill switches. The Deadman kill switch uses unbalanced reciprocal transcriptional repression to couple a specific input signal with cell survival. The Passcode kill switch uses a similar two-layered transcription design and incorporates hybrid LacI-GalR family transcription factors to provide diverse and complex environmental inputs to control circuit function. These synthetic gene circuits efficiently killEscherichia coli and can be readily reprogrammed to change their environmental inputs, regulatory architecture and killing mechanism.

 

Nontoxic antimicrobials that evade drug resistance

Stephen A DavisBenjamin M VincentMatthew M EndoLuke WhitesellKaren MarchilloDavid R AndesSusan Lindquist & Martin D Burke

Nature Chemical Biology 2015;11:481–487          http://dx.doi.org:/10.1038/nchembio.1821

Drugs that act more promiscuously provide fewer routes for the emergence of resistant mutants. This benefit, however, often comes at the cost of serious off-target and dose-limiting toxicities. The classic example is the antifungal amphotericin B (AmB), which has evaded resistance for more than half a century. We report markedly less toxic amphotericins that nevertheless evade resistance. They are scalably accessed in just three steps from the natural product, and they bind their target (the fungal sterol ergosterol) with far greater selectivity than AmB. Hence, they are less toxic and far more effective in a mouse model of systemic candidiasis. To our surprise, exhaustive efforts to select for mutants resistant to these more selective compounds revealed that they are just as impervious to resistance as AmB. Thus, highly selective cytocidal action and the evasion of resistance are not mutually exclusive, suggesting practical routes to the discovery of less toxic, resistance-evasive therapies.

 

 

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Genetically Engineered Algae, Volume 2 (Volume Two: Latest in Genomics Methodologies for Therapeutics: Gene Editing, NGS and BioInformatics, Simulations and the Genome Ontology), Part 1: Next Generation Sequencing (NGS)

Genetically Engineered Algae

Curator: Larry H. Bernstein, MD, FCAP

 

 

Genetically engineered algae kill cancer cells

By Tim Sandle     Nov 11, 2015 in Science

http://www.digitaljournal.com/science/are-algae-the-solution-to-beating-cancer/article/449045#ixzz3rZQZ7pRj

A research group in Australia has developed algae nanoparticles. The algae have been found to kill 90 percent of cancer cells in cultured human cells. Based on this success, the modified algae have been shown to destroy cancerous tumors in mice.

 Algae is a general term for a range of single-celled microscopic photosynthetic organisms such as diatoms, and larger, multi-cellular plants, like kelp. The use of algae in cancer treatment relates to drug delivery. Some success has been achieved with the use of nanoparticles (such as nanoporous silica) to deliver anti-cancer medicines. One downside with this relates to the cost of production and the fact that some nanoparticles can be toxic. To overcome this, researchers based at the University of South Australia have used algae to model an alternative drug delivery system.
Success has been achieved with microalgae-derived nanoporous biosilica. The bio-material was derived from Thalassiosira pseudonana, which is a species of marine diatom. Diatoms are are among the most common types of phytoplankton, and they are found in the oceans, in freshwater, in soils and on damp surfaces. In studies, modified diatoms have been used as types of backpacks for the targeted delivery of anticancer drugs to tumor sites.

Lead researcher Nico Voelcker, speaking with International Business Times, explained why genetic modification was key in adapting the diatoms: “By genetically engineering diatom algae – tiny, unicellular, photosynthesising algae with a skeleton made of nanoporous silica, we are able to produce an antibody-binding protein on the surface of their shells. Anti-cancer chemotherapeutic drugs are often toxic to normal tissues.”

 Although the results are interesting, experiments in cell culture and even on mice do not necessarily translate into success in humans. A series of clinical trials will be required to verify the results and to streamline any potential treatment options.

The research is published in the journal Nature Communications, in a paper headed “Targeted drug delivery using genetically engineered diatom biosilica.”

Targeted drug delivery using genetically engineered diatom biosilica

 

The ability to selectively kill cancerous cell populations while leaving healthy cells unaffected is a key goal in anticancer therapeutics. The use of nanoporous silica-based materials as drug-delivery vehicles has recently proven successful, yet production of these materials requires costly and toxic chemicals. Here we use diatom microalgae-derived nanoporous biosilica to deliver chemotherapeutic drugs to cancer cells. The diatom Thalassiosira pseudonana is genetically engineered to display an IgG-binding domain of protein G on the biosilica surface, enabling attachment of cell-targeting antibodies. Neuroblastoma and B-lymphoma cells are selectively targeted and killed by biosilica displaying specific antibodies sorbed with drug-loaded nanoparticles. Treatment with the same biosilica leads to tumour growth regression in a subcutaneous mouse xenograft model of neuroblastoma. These data indicate that genetically engineered biosilica frustules may be used as versatile ‘backpacks’ for the targeted delivery of poorly water-soluble anticancer drugs to tumour sites.

 

Figure 1: The principle of action of the genetically engineered biosilica therapeutic nanoparticles

The principle of action of the genetically engineered biosilica therapeutic nanoparticles.

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/151110/ncomms9791/carousel/ncomms9791-f1.jpg

Genetically engineered diatom biosilica (green) containing liposome-encapsulated drug molecules (yellow) can be targeted to both adherent neuroblastoma cells (red) and lymphocyte cells in suspension (purple) by functionalizing the biosilica

 

Figure 2: SEM images of T. pseudonana biosilica and analysis of IgG–HRP binding to T. pseudonana biosilica

SEM images of T. pseudonana biosilica and analysis of IgG-HRP binding to T. pseudonana biosilica.

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/151110/ncomms9791/carousel/ncomms9791-f2.jpg

(a) Side view and (b) top view of cylinder-shaped biosilica from a single diatom cell. (c,d) Details of the biosilica structure showing the highly porous surface. (e) Schematic structure of the S–T8–GFP–GB1 fusion protein. S, N-terminal…

 

Figure 4: Interaction of anti-CD20 antibody-labelled GB1–biosilica with B and T cells captured on an anti-CD45 antibody microarray.

Interaction of anti-CD20 antibody-labelled GB1-biosilica with B and T cells captured on an anti-CD45 antibody microarray.

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/151110/ncomms9791/carousel/ncomms9791-f4.jpg

The left panels show epifluorescence microscopy images of cells captured on microarray spots after incubation with anti-CD20 antibody-labelled biosilica (n=3). The right panels show higher magnification images within the spots. Green: b…

 

Figure 6: Interaction of anti-p75NTR–GB1–biosilica frustules with adherent cells

Interaction of anti-p75NTR-GB1-biosilica frustules with adherent cells.

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/151110/ncomms9791/carousel/ncomms9791-f6.jpg

(a) Confocal fluorescence microscopy image of SH-SY5Y neuroblastoma cells and (b) BSR fibroblast cells (n=3). Red: actin (phalloidin staining, green: biosilica (GFP-labelled), blue: nucleus (Hoechst 33342 staining). (c) The left panel s…

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