Doudna Talks Importance of Collaboration at #ASGCT23
Catherine Gillespie - June 06, 2023
Where better than L.A. to learn that “Stars — They’re Just Like Us!” is not just an Us Weekly feature, but the honest to goodness truth? Yes, even when it comes to Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna, PhD.
Dr. Doudna’s keynote address, CRISPR Chemistry and Applications in the Clinic, revealed two facts of scientific life intimately familiar to anyone who has spent time in a lab. First, she highlighted how presenting your data at national scientific conferences like the ASGCT Annual Meeting can lead to fruitful collaboration. Second, she discussed how, even at the highest levels, decisions made to accommodate real-world manufacturing constraints can change the course of science.
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In response to work presented at a national meeting, Howard Chang, MD, PhD, approached one of Dr. Doudna’s lab members to discuss some data his lab at Stanford had generated in collaboration with Carl June, MD. Illustrating the potential future significance of all the previously unused data you may have stored on your drives, Dr. Chang provided the Doudna lab with RNA sequencing results from the CRISPR-edited T cells used in a clinical trial (Edward A Stadtmauer 2020), revealing that the chromosome loss her lab observed in gene-edited T cells was not universal.
While the standard lab protocol for editing T cells resulted almost uniformly in 3% chromosome loss, regardless of the guide RNA used or gene targeted, there was a very low percentage of chromosome loss in gene-edited T cells from the clinical trial. Due to the limited quantity of GMP-grade reagent, the June lab had switched the order of operations for CRISPR editing their T cells. Instead of editing the cells after an activation and expansion step, the clinical T cells were expanded after editing. When reproduced with more than 10 different guide RNAs, this clinical protocol produced less chromosome loss compared to the traditional laboratory sequence.
For these and other insights from the co-inventor of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology, those who registered for the ASGCT 26th Annual Meeting can see her full talk here through June 23. If you haven't registered, you can do so through June 19.
Ms. Gillespie is chair of ASGCT's Communications Committee.
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