Future Treatment of Microbiome Diseases

      In an article published in C&EN by Ryan Cross in the Synthetic Biology section, "CRISPR’s next target: The bad bugs in your gut," there is discussion about the future treatment of microbiome diseases using CRISPR technology. 
     While there is always an abundance of research initiatives, there tends to be a shortage of money for these projects. Luckily, Eligo Bioscience, a French biotechnology company startup, recently got its first $20 million series A funding for the research and treatment of microbiome diseases using CRISPR technology. CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a pair of "molecular scissors" that can be engineered to modify the human genome. Eligo Bioscience aims to use bacteriophages as a vehicle to deliver the CRISPR system to the harmful gut bacteria. In doing so, the CAS9 enzyme will cut the essential DNA strands indicated by the guide RNA. Without the essential DNA strands that support cell production, the harmful bacteria will die, therefore curing the disease. 
      CRISPR can solve issues in the medical field such as antibiotic resistant bacteria, or rare gut diseases. The research happening in Eligo Bioscience is a new creative way of using the CRISPR technology to our advantage. I would love to work in this field of study in the future and I am always looking forward to seeing improvements with medical diseases. I think it is great that the biotech company is focusing their research on rare diseases that do not have cures yet. It would be great if all diseases could be cured using CRISPR technology in the near future.


http://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/cen-09539-notw10

https://www.addgene.org/crispr/guide/