New Treatment EBT-101 Could Provide a Breakthrough Cure for HIV

Excision Biotherapeutics’ groundbreaking HIV treatment, EBT-101, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration to begin testing for its first phase of human trials. This new treatment relies on the Nobel Prize-winning, gene-editing technology CRISPR to successfully remove HIV proviral DNA from human cells. Scientists believe that this one-time treatment will “functionally cure” people from the virus, meaning only small traces of the HIV genome …

Bringing Extinct Species Back From the Dead with Gene-Editing

American scientist Ben Novak has spent the past six years working on a process referred to as de-extinction—with the goal of bringing back the passenger pigeon species that died off in 1914. In Melbourne, Australia Novak has used gene-editing to weave the Cas9 gene into the reproductive organs of common pigeons. Cas9 enables the use of CRISPR, a tool that acts as molecular scissors and …