About four years ago, Ruben Tommasi, the gregarious scientific chief of antibiotics startup Entasis, walked into a meeting with his top chemist and top biologist to chew over another batch of unchanging results.

“It felt like we were running the same experiment over and over,” Tommasi told Endpoints News. “We had all sort of come to that point in time where we felt like we were banging our heads against the wall.”

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As one of the pioneers behind CRISPR, the Broad Institute’s Feng Zhang has fashioned himself into a gene editing Renaissance man in recent years with a finger in every pie. For RNA editing, one of his passion projects, Zhang has worked to crack a chronic delivery logjam — and his team has just made a big breakthrough there.

A team of researchers out of Zhang’s lab has built a pair of “ultracompact” RNA editing tools that can fit inside an adeno-associated virus (AAV) package, potentially creating a breakthrough in the delivery of those gene editing tools into human cells, according to an article published in Nature Biotechnology on Monday.

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MIT star researcher and CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang put a new paper out Thursday in Science detailing how a new technology could alter a field that’s already proven game-changing throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.

Zhang and his team have developed a potential new delivery method for mRNA therapeutics, they reported in their paper, working out a way for human proteins to bind to their own mRNA and package themselves in a protective capsule. That approach differs from the technology used for delivering the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines or for therapies that rely on delivering genetic material into cells, such as gene therapy and CRISPR-Cas9  — all of which utilize lipid nanoparticles or viral vectors.

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A whole industry may have been born out of the spectacular success of CD19 CAR-T, pushing the envelope on next-generation constructs hitting new targets. But a group of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania reckons there’s still plenty of new things you can do with the OG cell therapy — with the help of a familiar class of drugs.

In doing so, they may have uncovered a way to get around T cell exhaustion, which has been a central challenge for the field.

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Nearly a year ago, Google’s AI outfit DeepMind announced they had cracked one of the oldest problems in biology: predicting a protein’s structure from its sequence alone. Now they’ve turned that software on nearly every human protein and hundreds of thousands of additional proteins from organisms important to medical research, such as fruit flies, mice and malaria parasite.

The new database of roughly 350,000 protein sequences and structures represents a potentially monumental achievement for the life sciences, one that could hasten new biological insights and the development of new drugs. DeepMind said it will be free and accessible to all researchers and companies.

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Just weeks ago controversial anti-aging researcher Elizabeth Parrish attracted considerable attention for a tiny human gene therapy study she claimed was underway in Mexico, testing a new approach to age-related dementia. Now the biotech exec is back in the spotlight, with celebrated Harvard scientific advisor George Church by her side, posting a mouse study that stakes a claim to a remarkable extension of animals’ life spans using an “intranasal and injectable” gene therapy.

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