University of Pennsylvania Department of Bioengineering
This week, we present our interview with incoming faculty member Konrad Kording, who starts as a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and the Department of Neuroscience in the Perelman School of Medicine. Konrad and Andrew Mathis discuss what neuroscience is and isn’t, the “C” word (consciousness), and what it’s like for a native of Germany to live in the United States.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
There’s news in bioengineering every week, to be sure, but the big story this past week is one that’s sure to continue appearing in headlines for days, weeks, and months — if not years — to come. This story is CRISPR-Cas9, or CRISPR for short, the gene-editing technology that many geneticists are viewing as the wave of the future in terms of the diagnosis and treatment of genetic disorders.
Standing for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, CRISPR offers the ability to cut a cell’s genome at a predetermined location and remove and replace genes at this location. As a result, if the location is one at which the genes code for a particular disease, these genes can be edited out and replaced with healthy ones. Obviously, the impl
ications for this technology are enormous.
This week, it was reported that, for the first time, CRISPR was successfully used by scientists to edit the genomes of human embryos. As detailed in a paper published in Nature, these scientists edited the genomes of 50 single-cell embryos, which were subsequently allowed to undergo division until the three-day mark, at which point the multiple cells in the embryos were assessed to see whether the edits had been replicated in the new cells. In 72% of them, they had been.
In this particular case, the gene edited out was one for a type of congenital heart defect, and the embryos were created from the eggs of healthy women and the sperm of men carrying the gene for the defect. However, the experiments prove that the technology could now be applied in other disorders.
Needless to say, the coverage of this science story has been enormous, so here is a collection of links to coverage on the topic. Enjoy!
Andrew Tsourkas, Ph.D., who is an associate professor in the Department of Bioengineering, cofounded PolyAurum LLC, a company using gold particles to develop technologies to improve cancer therapies, in 2015. Dr. Tsourkas founded the company with two faculty members from the Perelman School of Medicine: Jay Dorsey, M.D., Ph.D., and Dave Cormode, Ph.D., the latter of whom is also a secondary factory member in BE. The name PolyAurum combines the word polymer with aurum, the Latin word for “gold.” Gold has been found to be able to enhance the effects of radiation therapy in cancer without damaging healthy tissue.
Dr. Tsourkas’s work with his colleagues at PolyAurum was featured recently in the The Philadelphia Inquirer. Debra Travers, the CEO of PolyAurum and herself a cancer survivor, was interviewed by the newspaper for its business section.
According to the article, Drs. Tsourkas and Cormode
have worked to make gold more biocompatible, resulting in PolyAurum’s current technology, Dorsey said. The gold nanocrystals are contained in a biodegradable polymer that allows enough metal to collect in a tumor. The polymer then breaks down, releasing the gold for excretion from the body so that it does not build up in key organs.
Read more at the Inquirer Web site.