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(Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense)
A team of researchers from Georgia Tech, Georgia State University, and Emory University has developed a therapy to target and kill dengue virus using the gene editing tool CRISPR-Cas13. The team used lipid nanoparticles that carried a custom-coded messenger RNA (mRNA) molecule. The mRNA encodes for a CRISPR protein that cuts viral RNA. When the encoded mRNA was delivered to infected cells, the cells used the mRNA instructions to build the CRISPR protein, which degraded the viral RNA within the cells. Thanks to this treatment, the team was able to treat dengue virus in mice.
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