Tannishtha Reya, PhD of UCSD @UCSDHealth discusses using genome-wide CRISPR technology to find leukemia"™s vulnerabilities.
A team of researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center used CRISPR technology to identify key regulators of aggressive chronic myeloid leukemia, a type of cancer that remains difficult to treat and is marked by frequent relapse.
“We used CRISPR technology to carry out a genome-wide screen in leukemia cells to block thousands of genes at once. This is an extremely powerful tool that allowed us to identify a multitude of genes that fuel leukemia growth and find new vulnerabilities that can be targeted in this disease,” said senior author Tannishtha Reya, PhD, professor in the departments of Pharmacology and Medicine. “The study also shows, for the first time, that whole genome CRISPR-based screens can in fact be carried out in a manner that is much more physiologically relevant: using primary cancer cells, and in the setting of the native microenvironment.”
Read here: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-04/uoc–flw042020.php