Nobel Laureate Doudna To Speak, Apr. 15
Dr. Jennifer Doudna, 2020 co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, will deliver an NIH Director’s Lecture on Monday, Apr. 15 at 1 p.m. as part of the Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series (WALS).
Photo: Christopher Michel
Titled the “Future of CRISPR: What’s Ahead for Genome Editing,” the lecture will be held in Masur Auditorium, Bldg. 10, and viewable online at https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=54303.
Doudna is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator as well as the Li Ka Shing chancellor’s chair in biomedical and health sciences and a professor of molecular therapeutics at the University of California, Berkeley.
In 2012, she and her colleague Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier, then at Umeå University in Sweden, proposed that CRISPR-Cas9, a set of enzymes that bacteria use to regulate immunity, could be employed for high-precision genome editing in higher-order species. The finding set off what has been called the CRISPR revolution and earned the two researchers the Nobel Prize and numerous other accolades.
Doudna has since become the face of genome editing. Indeed, “DNA” is in her name. Current research in her lab focuses on discovering and determining the mechanisms of novel CRISPR-Cas and associated proteins; developing genome-editing tools for use in vitro, in plants and in mammals; and advancing anti-CRISPR agents.
For her WALS Director’s talk, Doudna will discuss FDA approval of the first CRISPR therapy and ongoing research aimed at expanding access and reducing costs of CRISPR medicines. She will explain how CRISPR genome editing works and how CRISPR is used to treat patients with sickle cell disease. Then she will discuss ongoing research into the accuracy and delivery of CRISPR therapies that will make them more widely available in the future.
Learn more about this lecture on the WALS website at https://oir.nih.gov/wals.