A new preprint on bioRxiv describes a way to use CRISPR to kill cancer cells by reading the RNA they produce. Many cancers start with mutations in tumor suppressor proteins, the proteins that normally stop cells from growing out of control. One of them, p53, is altered in about 40 to 50% of cases. Those mutant proteins are hard to treat with drugs because they don’t have a pocket for a drug molecule to bind to.

The work uses Cas12a2, a CRISPR enzyme guided by RNA. It’s programmed to recognize a transcript, a piece of RNA, that only the cancer cells make. When it finds a match, it starts cutting DNA nearby in the cell’s chromatin, which does enough damage to kill the cell. Healthy cells don’t carry the target transcript, so they’re left alone.

The authors describe this as a way to go after mutations that drug developers have called undruggable. The paper is a preprint, so it hasn’t been through peer review yet.

See more at biorxiv.org. Via Hackaday.