29th Jan 2015 07:54
LONDON (Alliance News) - AstraZeneca PLC said Thursday it has entered four research collaborations to use genome editing technique CRISPR, which AstraZeneca hopes will complement its in-house CRISPR programme.
CRISPR allows scientists to make changes in specific genes.
AstraZeneca has signed deals with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, the Innovate Genomics Initiative in California, Thermo Fischer Scientific Inc in Massachusetts, and the Broad Institute and Whitehead Institute in Massachusetts.
With Wellcome Trust Sanger, AstraZeneca will be focusing on the deleting of specific genes relating to cancer, cardiovascular, metabolic, respiratory, autoimmune and inflammatory diseases and regenerative medicine. With Innovative Genomics, it will focus on inhibiting or activating genes to understand their role in disease pathology, with a focus on the same set of diseases.
Under its deal with Thermo Fisher, AstraZeneca will receive ribonucleic acid guide libraries that target individual known human genes and gene families, which it can screen against cell lines to identify new disease targets.
Finally, with the Broad Institute and Whitehead Institute, AstraZeneca will evaluate a genome-wide CRISPR library against a panel of cancer cell lines with the aim of identifying new targets for cancer drug discovery.
By Hana Stewart-Smith; [email protected]; @HanaSSAllNews
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