GoKawiil
Tech News
Prime Medicine has treated the first patient in a clinical trial using prime editing, a precise gene-editing technique, to correct a mutation in liver cells directly inside the body. The target is Wilson disease, caused by mutations in the ATP7B gene that leave excess copper to build up and damage the liver and nervous system. The company says it expects to report initial trial results next year.
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis used Ube3a-deficient mice, a standard model of Angelman syndrome, along with a newly engineered Asns-mutant mouse line, to study neuronal stress signaling. They report that sustained activation of a cellular stress pathway in neurons contributes to the behavioral and neurological phenotypes seen in the Angelman mouse model.
Norwich-based Tropic has developed a gene-edited banana that resists browning for an extra day or two after peeling, using CRISPR-Cas9 to suppress three copies of the gene behind the polyphenol oxidase enzyme. CEO Gilad Gershon said the fruit is already grown in Latin America and has regulatory approval in 10 countries including Japan, Brazil and the Philippines, and is now nearing UK supermarket shelves.
Researchers, including Ying Zhang at Wuhan University and Shannon Miller at Scripps Research, are developing a range of genome-editing technologies that go beyond standard CRISPR-Cas9, some building on it and others operating independently. These newer methods are designed to insert or replace larger stretches of DNA, a task CRISPR-Cas9 struggles with, though the field remains in early stages.
Anthropic reported that its Claude AI model identified a previously undocumented enzyme system that structurally resembles the Cas9 protein used in CRISPR gene editing. The company acknowledged it cannot yet confirm what functions the newly flagged system actually performs.
Researchers at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital used CRISPR-Cas9 screening in mouse T cell models to identify ZMYND8 as a regulator of T cell exhaustion. Removing ZMYND8 boosted IL-2 signalling in antigen-specific CD8+ T cells, including those engineered with CAR constructs, helping the cells retain function against tumours in mouse models.
Researchers using engineered HCT116 cell lines with degradable cohesin components (RAD21, WAPL, CTCF) and SMARCAL1 showed that cohesin actively reorganizes chromatin contacts around replication forks. This reshaping helps slow down forks and promotes their reversal when replication stress occurs, linking genome organization machinery directly to DNA replication control.
Researchers delivered the ABE8e-V106W base editor as a protein into fertilized human embryos and successfully edited all copies of the PCSK9 gene without producing insertions or deletions, allowing embryos to develop to the blastocyst stage and yielding homozygous edited stem cell lines. However, they also observed occasional chromosome breaks, mosaic editing at nearby and off-target sites, and frequent embryo arrest when the editor was delivered as mRNA instead of protein.
An updated study published in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that a one-time CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing infusion kept LDL cholesterol and triglycerides roughly 50% lower a full year after treatment in patients who received the highest dose. The follow-up builds on a small November 2025 pilot trial of 15 patients with medication-resistant high cholesterol, testing five dosage levels for safety, with researchers now confirming the effect appears durable rather than temporary.