Fyodor Urnov has been a pioneer and leader in genome editing, a term he invented, since that field began. He is a U.C. Berkeley colleague of Jennifer Doudna, who along with French scientist Emmanuele Charpentier won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their invention of CRISPR. Urnov’s pioneering work paved the way for that breakthrough.
This is an exciting, even emotionally exhausting interview. Urnov provides a dazzling overview of the astonishing recent progress in genome editing and its applications in medicine, some of which his lab is pursuing. He is bursting with enthusiasm and optimism about its near-term prospects for helping rare disease patients. This approach provides perhaps the strongest ray of hope yet, for improving the lives of mito patients for whom no treatment currently exists.
Video and transcript are both provided.
