PhD in Microbiology and Immunology from Stanford University

Exploring Tumor Susceptibilities by CRISPR-Cas13a

The advent of CRISPR technology has accelerated the pace of genomic medicine. Using CRISPR, it is now possible to precisely target disease loci with single nucleotides resolution. This technological innovation is particularly relevant to oncogenesis, a disease of the genome. Malignancies that are driven by oncogenic fusions are strong candidates for CRISPR-mediate gene therapy since they constitute genomic aberrations not present in non-cancerous cells. My thesis is that CRISPR-based tools may be pliable for specific targeting of cancers with common oncogenic mutations.