Life scientists used to dream of the day they could not only read the genes, but edit them to correct errors and fight disease. Today, that’s becoming a reality through the efforts of Duke biomedical engineer Charles Gersbach.
His gene editing prowess made global news in 2015 when his team described using the editing tool CRISPR to excise a dysfunctional part of the gene that is defective in muscular dystrophy. The following year, Gersbach demonstrated that CRISPR could be used to convert cells of connective tissue into functioning neurons.
Today, Gersbach directs the Duke Center for Advanced Genome Technology (CAGT), which is supported by Duke’s schools of medicine, engineering and arts & sciences.
He is the John W. Strohbehn Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering and a serial entrepreneur whose gene-editing innovations have so far led to three spinout companies. One of his startups, Element Genomics, was acquired in 2018 by a global pharmaceuticals company.
A 2021 launch, Tune Therapeutics, has developed a tool for ‘tuning’ gene activity by addressing the control sequences of the genes called the epigenome. Gersbach explains that the technology can turn up a gene that’s too quiet, or calm down a gene that’s too active, without changing the DNA structure.
Gersbach is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors and is also consistently among Duke’s most-cited faculty, a measure of how much other scholars value his research findings.
“We’re still at the very beginning of understanding how CRISPR is going to be used, what it can do, and what systems are available to us,” Gersbach said in a 2019 interview. “We expect that this new tool will enable new areas of genome engineering.”