Immune reaction

The beating that gene editing stocks took this week on immunogenicity concerns about Cas9, the technology’s workhorse enzyme, are the latest consequence of the field pushing to run while still learning to walk. The field’s scientists, by contrast, see it as one of many surmountable hurdles they are likely to face.

Last Friday, Stanford University professor Matthew Porteus published a study on the preprint server bioRxiv suggesting a large percentage of the human population has pre-existing immunity to the two enzymes most commonly used for CRISPR-based gene editing: Staphylococcus aureus Cas9 and Streptococcus pyogenes Cas9...