David Liu (Casey Atkins Photography courtesy Broad Institute)

In­tel­lia an­nounced a new tool for gene edit­ing. Aca­d­e­mics said they rewrote his­to­ry

David Liu, the Har­vard bio­chemist, was sit­ting in a meet­ing last week when his phone start­ed buzzing re­peat­ed­ly.

Un­be­knownst to him, min­utes pri­or the CRISPR com­pa­ny In­tel­lia had fin­ished un­veil­ing their ap­proach to base edit­ing at a Cold Spring Har­bor Lab con­fer­ence. First pi­o­neered by Liu and his lab in 2016, the method al­lows you to change in­di­vid­ual DNA bases with­out break­ing the dou­ble he­lix, an ad­vance that could prove crit­i­cal for treat­ing a long list of can­cers and ge­net­ic dis­eases.

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