The Sanchez-Rivera Lab devised a method to screen for the effects of cancer-associated genetic mutations much more easily and quickly than any existing approach. In a Nature Biotechnology study of lung cancer, researchers used a variant of CRISPR genome-editing called prime editing to screen cells with more than 1,000 different mutations of the tumor suppressor gene p53 observed in cancer patients. They found that some p53 mutations are more harmful than previously thought. The technique could one day be used to determine how an individual patient’s tumor will respond to a particular treatment.
This research was funded in part by the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program via the Casey and Family Foundation Cancer Research Fund, the Ludwig Center at MIT, and Upstage Lung Cancer.