On a recent trip to Giant Eagle, my local grocery store in Pittsburgh, I noticed something new in the fruit section: a single pineapple packaged in a pink and forest-green box. A picture on the front showed the pineapple cut open, revealing rose-colored flesh. Touted as the “jewel of the jungle,” the fruit was the … Read more
De-extinction startup Colossal Biosciences wants to bring back the woolly mammoth. Well, not the woolly mammoth exactly, but an Asian elephant gene-edited to give it the fuzzy hair and layer of blubber that allowed its close relative to thrive in sub-zero environments. To get to these so-called “functional mammoths,” Colossal’s scientists need to solve a … Read more
To keep IL-12 inside tumors, scientists at Strand designed a set of instructions called a genetic circuit that tells the mRNA to make the inflammatory protein only when it detects the tumor microenvironment. The circuit is designed to sense levels of microRNA—molecules that naturally regulate gene expression and give off different signatures in cancer cells … Read more
“This is a terrible disease,” says Samarth Kulkarni, president and CEO of Crispr Therapeutics. “Every day feels like a big burden. Patients have this constant specter of mortality hanging over them.” The culprit is abnormal hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen through the body. The problem arises from a mutation in the HBB gene. Everyone … Read more
Researchers at the company collected the patient’s B cells using a machine that removes blood, separates out a particular component, then returns the rest to circulation. There are billions of B cells in the body; Immusoft uses only a portion. “The body is constantly regenerating and producing new B cells,” Ainsworth says. To get the … Read more
