UC San Diego researchers find new system for gene editing that may be safer than CRISPR

Gene editing figures to be part of the future of medicine, but a popular system for it has some room for improvement, researchers say.

That’s why a team from UC San Diego in La Jolla set out with Yale University researchers to develop a new system for gene editing that they believe may be safer and more efficient than the common current method known as CRISPR.

CRISPR, short for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” uses RNA and bacterial proteins to edit DNA. According to UCSD, it was adapted from a method used by bacteria as an immune defense against the DNA of viruses.

But when scientists use the method to edit human DNA, there can be unintended consequences such as genomic damage, said Aaron Smargon, first author of the study and an assistant project scientist