David Liu un­veils newest ad­vance­ment in CRISPR tech: Prime edit­ing

The re­searcher be­hind base-edit­ing is out with what some sci­en­tists are hail­ing as the biggest ad­vance­ment in CRISPR tech­nol­o­gy since that 2016 break­through: “prime edit­ing.” The new mol­e­c­u­lar gad­get is ca­pa­ble of eras­ing any base pair and sten­cil­ing in an­oth­er and cut­ting or adding long seg­ments of DNA with­out break­ing both strands of the he­lix.

David Liu, base edit­ing pi­o­neer and founder of Beam Ther­a­peu­tics, pub­lished the find­ings in Na­ture along­side An­drew An­za­lone. They es­ti­mat­ed that the break­through “in prin­ci­ple” puts 89% of hu­man dis­eases in purview — al­though ex­perts cau­tioned that hu­man ther­a­pies were a long way off.

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