The CRISPR gene-editing tool has already shown a lot of potential for helping doctors treat the most stubborn diseases, and now scientists have used it to target the “command centre” of cancerous tumours, stopping their growth and boosting survival rates in mice.
In this new study, CRISPR was aimed directly at fusion genes – formed when two genes combine to form a hybrid, resulting in abnormal proteins which often cause cancer or help it to grow.
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Once modified, the CRISPR-edited, cancer-killing genes were injected into mice carrying human prostate and liver cancer cells. The tumours reduced in size by up to 30 percent, no secondary growths were noted, and all the mice survived until the end of the eight-week test.
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More research is also needed to see if this can work as well in humans as it does in mice, but as these were human cancers xenografted to mice, the work so far is much more promising than a traditional mouse study.
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