Just a decade after Crispr was invented, the first drug to make use of the revolutionary gene-editing technology will be with regulators by the end of the year, with the promise that it will eventually transform the treatment of genetic diseases.
In 2012, Nobel Prize winners Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier published a scientific paper proving a key part of the bacterial immune system could be used to cut DNA: disrupting, deleting or correcting genetic errors.
Their discovery started a race by start-ups to create transformative — and possibly even curative — treatments, which has developed much faster than previous advances in biology.