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‘Epigenetic’ editing cuts cholesterol in mice
Changes to chemical tags on DNA in mice dial down the activity of a gene without cuts to the genome.
To address these questions, Angelo Lombardo, a gene-therapy researcher at the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan, Italy, and his colleagues used molecules called zinc finger proteins that, much like the CRISPR–Cas9 system, can be designed to bind to specific sequences in the genome. That cocktail of fragments was drawn from a suite of proteins that act during embryonic development, adding methyl groups to ensure that viral sequences lurking in the genome — relics of past infections — are silenced and stay that way for a lifetime. And Omega Therapeutics, a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is conducting a clinical trial of an epigenetic editor that silences MYC, a gene that is overactive in many cancers and has been difficult to target using conventional drugs.
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