Grant: Project Grant

Tools like CRISPR have led a revolution in biomedical science. Its main advantage is the ease with which it can target a given location in the genome and either cut or otherwise modify it. On the other hand, it has fundamental disadvantages for applications as therapeutics that have to be directly administered to the patient. For instance, as CRISPR is derived from bacteria, it elicits an immune response in humans both to the detriment of efficacy and potentially dangerous to the patient. Zinc Fingers, on the other hand, do not suffer from those disadvantages and are ideally suited for direct administration to patients. However, the difficulty of engineering them to target given specific locations in the genome has severely hampered their developed. We here propose to use the power of modern artificial intelligence methods, combined with large-scale screens to effectively design Zinc Finger proteins as easily as CRISPR, thereby erasing any advantage the latter may have held, while simultaneously enabling novel therapeutic applications that have been hitherto not possible using CRISPR based approaches.