{"id":97290,"date":"2019-10-10T19:02:39","date_gmt":"2019-10-11T02:02:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/crispr-enzyme-programmed-to-kill-viruses-in-human-cells"},"modified":"2019-10-10T19:02:39","modified_gmt":"2019-10-11T02:02:39","slug":"crispr-enzyme-programmed-to-kill-viruses-in-human-cells","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/crispr-enzyme-programmed-to-kill-viruses-in-human-cells","title":{"rendered":"CRISPR enzyme programmed to kill viruses in human cells"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/crispr-enzyme-programmed-to-kill-viruses-in-human-cells2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Many of the world\u2019s most common or deadly human pathogens are RNA-based viruses\u2014Ebola, Zika and flu, for example\u2014and most have no FDA-approved treatments. A team led by researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has now turned a CRISPR RNA-cutting enzyme into an antiviral that can be programmed to detect and destroy RNA-based viruses in human cells.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers have previously adapted the Cas13 enzyme as a tool to cut and edit human RNA and as a diagnostic to detect the presence of viruses, bacteria, or other targets. This study is one of the first to harness Cas13, or any CRISPR system, as an antiviral in cultured <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/human+cells\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">human cells<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers combined Cas13\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/antiviral+activity\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">antiviral activity<\/a> with its diagnostic capability to create a single system that may one day be used to both diagnose and treat a viral infection, including infections caused by new and emerging viruses. Their system, called CARVER (Cas13-Assisted Restriction of Viral Expression and Readout), is described today in Molecular Cell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Many of the world\u2019s most common or deadly human pathogens are RNA-based viruses\u2014Ebola, Zika and flu, for example\u2014and most have no FDA-approved treatments. A team led by researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has now turned a CRISPR RNA-cutting enzyme into an antiviral that can be programmed to detect and destroy RNA-based [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97290\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}