Can CRISPR Make The Jump To Therapeutics?

It's late in the evening, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, PhD, is in a talkative mood. It's been about three years since the French microbiologist and her colleagues explained in a Nature paper how the innate immune system of some prokaryotes – bacteria and archaea – used two strands of RNA and an enzyme to chop up the DNA of invading viruses, and slowly, lights clicked on across the biomedical research world.

"I'm a microbiologist, I'm not a genome editing person," Charpentier says. "I wasn't expecting I would discover a totally new mechanism and it would have such a large effect on...