Jennifer Doudna

So we were founded 10 years ago as a joint institute between UC Berkeley and UCSF, and now we have a third campus partner, UC Davis, and we have the Gladstone Institute.

So we've got an extraordinary group of clinicians and researchers that are coming together for this project and this center to make it a success.

And we are building a clinical team at UCSF.

We have several extraordinary leaders, including Jennifer Puck and Chris Dvorak.

And they are both going to be involved in identifying patients that could be enrolled in this program based on their diagnosis.

And we will have a clinical advisory group that will help with that as well.

So we'll be vetting patients probably right after we announce this.

We're going to be looking to start enrolling people who might need this type of help.

I think it could be.

And here's the reason.

There's a very interesting possibility that because of the type of technology that we're talking about with CRISPR, which fundamentally, and you and I have talked about this previously on your other podcast, but

You know, we've talked about the fact that it's a programmable technology, and that means that we can change one aspect of it, one piece of it, which is a piece of a molecule called RNA that's able to direct CRISPR to the right sequence where we want to do editing and not change anything else about it.

Right.

The protein, the CRISPR protein stays the same.

The delivery vehicle stays the same.

Everything else stays the same.

And so we're working right now with FDA to get a platform designation for CRISPR that might allow streamlining of the testing process in some cases.

So, you know, it'll obviously come down to the details of the disease, but we're hopeful that in the end it will be possible.

And, you know, Priscilla and I have talked about this too, that as, you know, AI continues to advance and we get more and more information about rare diseases, we'll be able to predict accurately the effects of editing.

And so in some cases in the future, it may be possible to streamline the testing process even further safely.