2023/11/22
Keio University School of Medicine
A joint research group, including Professor Yuki Kagoya and Senior Lecturer Yusuke Ito from the Division of Cancer Immunology at the Institute for Advanced Medical Research, Keio University School of Medicine, and Associate Professor Tetsuro Ishikawa from the Ishii-Ishibashi Memorial Laboratory (Medical Science for Augmented Intelligence), has successfully developed an efficient design algorithm for deleting genes using the CRISPR/Cas9 system.
CAR-T cell therapy, a type of immunotherapy for cancer, is a novel treatment in which a patient's own immune cells (T cells) are engineered ex vivo to attack cancer cells before being infused back into the patient. Extensive research and development are underway to further enhance its efficacy. It has been found that the function of T cells can be enhanced by deleting specific genes, and the application of CRISPR/Cas9 technology is highly anticipated for this purpose.
However, depending on the gene, even modifications that are considered efficient may not always be successful. In this study, the research group developed a method to predict which genomic regions to target for efficient modification by quantitatively scoring the “accessibility” of these regions within T cells and combining this score with other design tools. They have also built a program to automatically design target sites for any given gene and have made it publicly available online for use by the broader research community.
The results of this research were published in Nucleic Acids Research , a journal by Oxford University Press, on November 21, 2023 (JST).
For the full press release, please see below.