Study of Van Gogh portrait with a pipe

Michael Vinnikov, September 23, 2018; Oil on canvas

…when research has been done, it needs to be published… So here is this post:

Congratulations to the researchers from University of Pittsburgh who have published their outstanding paper in Nature Biotechnology!

 

 

Chen Z.H., Yu Y.P., Zuo Z.H., Nelson J.B., Michalopoulos G.K., Monga S., Liu S., Tseng G. and Luo J.H. (2017). “Targeting genomic rearrangements in tumor cells through Cas9-mediated insertion of a suicide gene.” Nat Biotechnol 35(6): 543-550.

They have successfully implemented the idea which we have been independently developing since 2009: using CRISPR/Cas9-dependent targeting of specific genetic loci and subsequent activation of herpes virus thymidine kinase-ganciclovir cytotoxicity to kill the cells of interest.

Even though not being able to publish our story first, we are proud of what we have achieved  and happy for the US group for having succeeded. With that, to our great upset, after long discussions and considerations and despite the substantial progress in our structural and molecular studies, I decided to discontinue our project on a similar anti-cancer therapy approach, the main one for Dr. Anshul Tiwari and the secondary one for Ma Yuan. Thanks goes to both of them for their work as well as to our collaborators Prof. Haifeng Chen and his PhD student Ashfaq Ur Rehman within the School of Life Sciences and Biotechnology: now, we will go on towards reaching other tempting research goals.