CRISPR tech selectively shreds cancer cells, including "undruggable" cancers

Ifkaluva

I hope this finally works out. I remember almost exactly ten years ago I got excited about one of these proposed cancer cures, tried to talk about it at lunch with my coworkers, and they laughed at me for believing.

sssilver

What economic / political model would cause the society to prioritize this over adtech? It seems so unsettling that brilliant human minds are trying hard, every day, to figure out how to make it impossible to bypass watching ads on YouTube, instead of helping cure cancer.

bonsai_spool

Here's their preprint from a month ago, in case you can't access the Nature paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.08.723607v1 Nature - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10738-7

perlgeek

The article is pretty light on details, but > Much like other CRISPR therapies, delivery is a critical challenge, i.e., getting the large genome-cutting enzyme to all the targeted cells efficiently. makes me think this is in vitro so far. So, years to decades away from being available for actual treatment in humans. Still good news.

sourcegrift

Over on reddit people were debating whether cancer should be cured since it disproportionately affects rich people and it made me realise how far reddit has fallen. It's just a botnet now to manipulate elections.

zouhair

This is why I hate patents. If CRISPR were put behind a paywall, none of this would have happened. Everything having to be about profit is getting tiring.

Almondsetat

Can anyone point to some resources about how cancers might adapt to CRISPR treatments?

ordinaryradical

CRISPR is an extremely overhyped approach which found a marketing engine via popular science. There is 1 FDA approved CRISPR therapy as compared to 7 for AAV and 7 for Lentivirus. Counting all viral vector therapies that have been approved, we’re sitting at 19 approved therapies versus 1 for CRISPR. I think CRISPR ideas in a lab are just an easy way into the mainstream press, but viral vector delivery is the real future. It just didn’t get the same news cycle, for whatever reason.

needSomeCoffee

Jennifer Doudna again. What an amazing scientist. Wow.

yieldcrv

Cool. How can I help

MontyCarloHall

The idea of using CRISPR/Cas to detect tumor-specific mutations that aren't necessarily oncogenic and then kill the cell is not a new one [0, 1, 2]. However, previous studies used Cas9, which just damages the DNA at the target site; this uses Cas12a2, which is far more destructive because it shreds the chromatin in the cell once activated by detecting the target sequence. As with any cancer treatment, it's likely the tumor will evolve resistance. My guess is that cells will find ways to reject the lipid nanoparticles used to deliver the CRISPR/Cas mRNA and associated guide sequence(s), either via modifications to the cell surface (preventing LNP uptake) or via changes to endosomal/lysosomal pathways (causing the mRNA payload to get degraded before it has a chance to be translated into protein). [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28575452/ [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-30205-2 [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18875-x

red_admiral

For the state of new cancer-killing drugs and bottlenecks getting them approved, see also the top few posts on https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/archive The post on AI and and cures for cancer is https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/a-response-to-dario-amo... .

SilverElfin

So how do drugs like this get fast tracked so that people who are in danger of dying can exercise their freedom and opt into experimental treatments very easily

supertroop

Yes! I have a genetic disease that will take me out in my 70s and I’m really hoping CRISPR gets to it before I do!

himata4113

Does anyone know a website where I can see/read of how many cancers (and their variants) we've effectively solved, have drugs to negate their effects, have experimental drugs for and uncurable cancers? I think that graph would be awe inspiring looking at the past decade of advancements. What's more crazy is that we're slowly going from millenia, to decades, to likely years in the near future from being presented a biological problem and achieving the next milestone in solving it. We might have "AI", but we also have brilliant minds right now that are speeding up development to a pace that would be unimaginable just few years ago.

Asfand3099

What stands out to me is how cancer therapy keeps moving from broad destruction (chemo/radiation) toward increasingly precise identification of malignant cells. The challenge no longer seems to be "can we kill cancer cells?" but "can we reliably identify only cancer cells and reach all of them?" This paper looks like another step in that direction.

andrewlin247

been hearing about CRISPR since I was in middle school. is there actually any new development here?

est31

In order to kill all cancer cells in the body, it probably needs to be delivered to every single cell in the organism, and scan the nucleus of that cell. Viruses usually don't infect every single cell, just a small percentage. So one needs to figure out a delivery method that is efficient enough, and that doesn't elicit an immune response. But I guess one can analyze the cancer in the lab and figure out which receptors it expresses, and then bind to those? We could have a toolkit of different delivery methods, tailored for each patient's cancer.

hummuscience

Apparently this group was a bit late. Here is the first group with the same approach https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10466-y

silexia

Go CRISPR! I just lost a good friend Bobby to cancer who was a sweet kind man. Die cancer.