A New Startup Wants To Use CRISPR To Diagnose Disease
Genetics pioneer Jennifer Doudna has launched the first commercial Crispr platform for detecting disease-causing DNA.
In 2011, biologists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier published a landmark paper introducing the world to Crispr. The arcane family of bacterial proteins had a talent for precisely snipping DNA, and one of them—Cas9—has since inspired a billion-dollar boom in biotech investment. Clinical trials using Cas9 clippers to fix genetic defects are just beginning, so it will be years before Crispr-based cures could potentially reach the world.
But Crispr tech could actually be showing up in your doctor’s office way sooner. Not to treat what ails you, but to diagnose it.
Today, Doudna joined with researchers from her lab at UC Berkeley and bioinformaticians from Stanford to launch the first commercial Crispr platform for detecting disease-causing DNA. Called Mammoth Biosciences, the startup is developing point-of-care diagnostic tests that work by using Crispr to pick up bits of genetic material circulating in your blood, spit, or urine—say, a few copies of Zika virus left behind by a mosquito, or some mutations in a cancer cell shed from a tumor.
They’re not the only scientists working on this new Crispr capability, but they are the first to finance a company for its use. “There are these really amazing biosensing properties of Crispr that people hadn’t realized for a long time,” says Trevor Martin, Mammoth’s CEO and one of its five co-founders. “Billions of years of evolution have given us these incredible proteins, which science is just beginning to characterize.” Their goal is to use those properties to design diagnostics for the frontlines of outbreaks and in hospital emergency rooms, places where patients don’t have days to wait to send samples off to labs for testing.
