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© A R LE K SE Y / S H U TT ER ST O C K .C O M A new CRISPR gene-editing tool that engineers multiple edits simultaneously has the ability to rapidly reproduce the unique genetic components of a cancer tumor and will pave the way toward next-generation personalized care according to a study published in The CRISPR Journal.1 The technology was developed by scientists at the Christiana Care Health System’s Gene Editing Institute in Wilmington, Delaware, and at NovellusDx, an Israeli biotechnology company. The group’s study indicated that it is possible to extract DNA from a cell and engineer a patient’s specific tumor mutations through a process that can be completed in 24 hours. NovellusDX next plans to integrate the CRISPR-edited DNA samples into its cancer diagnostic platform in the hope that the new technology will help to rapidly screen a patient’s tumor for multiple cancer drugs that will provide the best treatments. CRISPR stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.” It is a defense mechanism found in bacteria that helps them to recognize and dissect the DNA of invading viruses. Scientists have been using CRISPR to treat a host of different diseases by repairing, changing, or deleting damaged genes. According to the study’s authors, unlike most molecular reactants used in vitro that can perform only 1 edit at a time, which significantly slows the process of discovering mutations and potential treatments, their new tool uses computer algorithms and live cells to more quickly find the driver mutations in patients’ tumors. Moreover, the tool relies on a protein called Cas12a to cut or edit DNA, which may be more reliable than the more commonly used Cas9 protein, according to the authors. They add that although the new technology does not edit a patient’s genome, its speed may help to advance efforts to do so.