Two Feng Zhang lab alum­ni find a new CRISPR en­zyme that could take a Big Gulp out of RNA — and a raft of dev­as­tat­ing dis­eases

MIT bud­dy bi­ol­o­gists Omar Abu­dayyeh and Jon Gooten­berg were sit­ting in the Que­bec Con­ven­tion Cen­ter at the an­nu­al CRISPR con­fer­ence in 2019 when, buried in a pre­sen­ta­tion on bac­te­r­i­al evo­lu­tion, they heard a nugget that made them chase down the pre­sen­ters the mo­ment they walked off stage.

Abu­dayyeh and Gooten­berg had worked to­geth­er since they were grad­u­ate stu­dents at CRISPR pi­o­neer Feng Zhang’s lab, where they dis­cov­ered a new gene edit­ing en­zyme called Cas13. Un­like most pre­vi­ous Cas en­zymes, Cas13 cut RNA in­stead of DNA. So the pair thought it might pro­vide a po­tent tool for treat­ing dis­eases, such as Hunt­ing­ton’s dis­ease or mus­cu­lar dy­s­tro­phy, caused by mistyped RNA.

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