Researchers at the University of California San Francisco have designed a new technique to lower the chances that an individual’s body will reject stem cells at the time of a transplant. Employing the CRISPR gene editing equipment, the researchers managed to make stem cells that are efficiently invisible to the immune system of the body.
Since transplanted stem cells are seen by the human body as an unidentified and possibly dangerous unknown organism, the immune system frequently kicks into high gear when the cells are identified. That can result in rejection of transplant. While there are some drugs that assist to suppress the response of immune system, it also leaves the individual exposed to other disorders that can complicate things. The altered stem cells made at UCSF present a possible solution to this issue by just not setting off the alarms of the immune system in the first place.
On a related note, the CRISPR researching is currently at its peak owing to the advancing methods used to foresee the accurate mutations CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing brings into a cell. Thus, the researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute have studied the effects of the gene editing before developing a machine learning predictive tool of the outcomes after studying about 40,000 special pieces of edited DNA followed by analysis of about thousands of resultant DNA sequences. The current study can prove promising for CRISPR-Cas9-linked conditions which the researchers can use to study drug targets or disease mechanisms.
The latest research will help the scientists guess the finest sequence to be targeted so as to render CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing cost-effective, dependable, and highly efficient. The CRISPR-Cas9, a gene editing technology, generally permits the researchers to cut DNA anywhere in the genome for mutation creation or switching off certain genes.
