A team of scientists from Stanford University https://stanford.edu are working with researchers at the Molecular Foundry https://foundry.lbl.gov, a nanoscience user facility, located at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory https://lbl.gov. The goal is to develop a gene-targeting antiviral agent to use against COVID-19.
Last year, Stanley Qi, Assistant Professor in the Departments of Bioengineering, and Chemical Systems Biology at Stanford and his team began working on a technique referred to as Prophylactic Antiviral CRISPER, or referred to as PAC-MAN which uses the gene-editing tool CRISPER to fight influenza.
That all changed when news of the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. Qi and his team were suddenly confronted with a mysterious new virus for with no clear solution. So the team thought they would try using the PAC-MAN technology to fight the virus.
Since late March, Qi and his team have been collaborating with a group led by Michael Connolly, Principal Scientific Engineering Associate in the Biological Nanostructures Facility at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry to develop a system able to deliver PAC-MAN into the cells of a patient. By scrambling the virus’s genetic code, the team thought that PAC-MAN could neutralize the coronavirus and stop the virus from replicating inside cells.
According to Qi, the key challenge is to translate PAC-MAN from a molecular tool into an anti-COVID-19 therapy with the capability to deliver to lung cells. When COVID-19 invades the lungs, the air sacs in an infected person can become inflamed and fill up with fluid.
Now Stanley Qi at Stanford and Michael Connolly at Molecular Foundry at Berkeley are working together to develop a gene targeting therapy that uses the gene-editing tool CRISPR to prevent COVID-19.
The team’s plans are to test the PAC-MAN/lipitoid system in an animal model against a live SAR-CoV-2 virus. They will be joined by collaborators at New York University and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm Sweden.
If successful, they hope to continue working with Connolly and his team to further develop PAC-MAN/lipitoid therapies for SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses, and explore scaling up their experiments for preclinical tests.
According to Connolly, “An effective lipitoid delivery, coupled with CRISPR targeting could enable a very powerful strategy for fighting viral disease not only t COVID-19 but possibly against newly viral strains with pandemic potential.”