Reck­on­ing the po­ten­tial of CRISPR/Cas9 tech, NIH launch­es $190M genome edit­ing re­search ini­tia­tive

Fran­cis Collins, the di­rec­tor of the Na­tion­al In­sti­tutes of Health CQ/Roll Call Get­ty

As the first hu­man tri­al in­volv­ing CRISPR comes in­to view in the Unit­ed States, the NIH has stepped up with a $190 mil­lion re­search ini­tia­tive to help float all the boats rid­ing on the wave of new genome edit­ing tech­nolo­gies.

Named So­mat­ic Cell Genome Edit­ing, the pro­gram will award funds over six years to re­searchers col­lab­o­rat­ing to ex­pand the toolk­it for the whole sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty.  im­prov­ing the de­liv­ery mech­a­nisms, de­vel­op­ing bet­ter ed­i­tors, de­sign­ing as­says to eval­u­ate those edit­ing tools, and as­sem­bling a pack­age of knowl­edge and meth­ods. Ul­ti­mate­ly, the hope is to re­move bar­ri­ers to broad adop­tion of the tech in the clin­ic.

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