Nobel Prize-Winner Jennifer Doudna on CRISPR and COVID-19 | Amanpour and Company

the w-h-o said that the best way to tackle this virus is to test test test this is a call to action that pioneering biochemist jennifer doudna and her colleagues at UC berkeley are working on now as they aim to use their biology labs to test up to 2,000 samples per day about Nicole founder of the gene editing tool CRISPR is using that technology to try to fight covert 19 as she explains to our Walter Isaacson now and full disclosure of course Walter is currently writing a book on Bowden ur and her work with CRISPR dr. Jennifer Doudna welcome to the show thank you for having me in early March when you watch the spread of the corona virus you suddenly decided it was time for scientists to kick into action so you took your berkeley lab and some of the surrounding labs and the san francisco area and you mobilize them tell me what you did and why we held a meeting to discuss how the scientists at UC berkeley and our surrounding institutions could get together and address this terrible pandemic and in one thing that emerged from that meeting was that we should find a way to use our resources and our knowledge to test for the virus many of us agree that one of the most the most important things to be done right now to address the disease is to understand who's infected and how to keep others safe and if you decide you're going to test you do a regular test but you have to get it approved right by the CDC and once you've done that what can you do what 500 a thousand tests per day so it's important to understand we're academic scientists we don't do clinical testing to do clinical tests with patient samples requires regulatory approval from multiple agencies so we've been on a very fast track to learn first of all what kind of regulate regulation do we need to comply with how do we ensure compliance and how do we get our scientists trained to work safely under these conditions and do it very fast so we've been fortunate the state of California under its emergency declaration has made it easier to get approval the Food and Drug Administration the federal level has also been very cooperative in helping us to do this and as a result we are really getting very close to being able to do a high throughput test for patient samples at UC Berkeley many other universities labs are being shut down like with the rest of the university do you think it would be a good idea for universities around the country to get permission to keep their biology labs open and shift them over to this thing of testing so every community could have a high throughput testing center well I would I would first say that you know we're inspired by the University of Washington many people may be aware that their folks their scientists have been testing patient samples for Meek's and they've played a big role actually in helping to stem the spread of the SARS co2 virus up in the Seattle and larger area in Washington State so we're inspired by this I think it's incredibly important that people be working safely at this time so we're very cognizant of having to use low density laboratory conditions making sure that our scientists are appropriately protected physically from any potential for infection but yes I mean I think beyond that you know if those conditions can be met and I think having scientists working at this time and contributing their expertise to fight this can Demick is very valuable you've said SARS co2 is that the same as the kovat 19 and the corona virus we've been talking about yeah let's do a little terminology check so I've had to learn this myself so SARS co2 refers to the actual virus that is causing the current pandemic corona viruses are the family of viruses that's the family of viruses that Tsarskoe to be wan-soo and kovat 19 is the terminology for the disease that this virus poses you'll be doing the type of tests we've been doing for the couple of months which is just a test for the presence of the virus I've noticed that now in Britain and other places they're starting to do antibody tests can you explain the difference right so the test that we're doing at Berkeley is a test that looks at the virus RNA it's the genetic material that allows the virus to replicate in upon infection so we're using a test called the polymerase chain reaction that's approved by the World Health Organization and the CDC it's a standard test and importantly it's able to detect the presence of the virus very soon after infection so the difference between that type of a test and what you're asking about a serum what we call a serological tests that looks for antibodies to the virus is that typically when someone gets exposed to the virus and their body makes antibodies it takes a while for that to happen so it's a it's really a test that looks after the fact has someone been infected by the virus also very useful to know obviously and to figure out who has immunity to the virus but one of the challenges right now with those types of tests as I've been learning is that the testing materials are not accurate enough to ensure detection of just the Stars co2 virus right now there's a lot of productivity other types of viruses and whereas many many biologists and scientists are working on this problem and they'll probably sort it out but I think that's one of the challenges with those tests right now it's taking four to six days to get the results of some of these tests would you be able to do it like in a few hours or a day yes so that's that's a primary goal of our lab at Berkeley and the innovative genomics Institute is to be fast so we have brought in high-throughput robotic equipment we've got companies helping us with data management and we hope to be able to do one to two thousand samples a day as you know I'm writing a book about you and the discovery of CRISPR which is the gene editing technology and CRISPR that technology is based on a trick bacteria figured out over the course of three billion years of how to fight viruses can you explain how CRISPR does that for bacteria sure so CRISPR is a an adaptive immune system it allows bacteria to detect viruses and protect themselves from future infection and it's a system that you know a handful of scientists were studying and and then a few years ago it was recognized that you know this system which operates as an immune system that we could actually Hermus it as a technology for something quite different which is genome editing and I think it's a I've been reflecting on this during this pandemic it's a fascinating parallel that bacteria have been dealing with viruses forever they've had to come up with creative ways to fight them and now here we are are humans in a pandemic facing this challenge and so we we often think about you know how can can CRISPR potentially impacts this pandemic in ways that will be beneficial to humans can CRISPR be used as a detection tool to help us detect the virus in ourselves so this is a really interesting use of CRISPR enzymes that takes advantage of something that my lab discovered about how they work which is that in some cases the enzymes that are able to interact with a piece of nucleic acid which is RNA or DNA and when they do that they turn on an activity a capability that allows a big amplification of the signal so in other words for every molecule of virus RNA that gets detected we can we can see many many molecules of a reporter a piece of nucleic acid like a little piece of DNA getting cut and so there's a way to do that you use that activity such that there's a big release of a chemical signal that can be seen visually and so you get you get a the use this CRISPR system to literally detect and then report on its detection of a piece of viral RNA very very quickly so in other word you can engineer it so that if it cuts something that's the virus we're talking about it gloves it sort of has a phosphorescent or some signal does that mean you could have home detection kits that could do it quickly and anybody could just look at it the way they could a pregnancy test and say I've got it that's the idea absolutely I think that's a very interesting possibility of how this system could ultimately be used are we talking a week a month or a year we're not talking a week we may be talking months we're certainly I think we're I think we're less than a year from that it's hard to say now we've been talking about detection like how can you test and detect this let's talk about treatments for a second i know that it stanford one of your friends and colleagues stanley key has come up with something he called pac-man which is a way for the actually use a CRISPR based system to actually attack the virus if somebody's sick tell us how that's progressing yeah so this is another clever idea about how to use CRISPR enzymes to fight the viral infection the idea there is to literally like for those of you that remember pac-man like I do you know literally using enzymes that will go after and cut and destroy only the viral RNA and not RNAs that are present in normal cells and so this is a I think a clever approach it's been tested in a laboratory setting and there's some you know hope there that that looks like technically it can work I think the challenge is how do you get that into into into a patient how do you get a nurse into infected cells and so if you wanted to get it into an effective cells you'd have to have a delivery mechanism what are the delivery mechanisms well it's very difficult because in the infection with this virus involved infection in the lung and so we would need to have a way to deliver these CRISPR enzymes into lung cells and that's something that's very hard right now fortunately there's a there's an effort at the innovative genomics to do exactly that for a different purpose namely for treating cystic fibrosis which is a lung disease that where we think eventually the CRISPR technology could have an impact so the notion that these CRISPR enzymes could cut up and chop away and destroy the Koba 19 virus in somebody's lungs let me ask the same question is that months away years away probably years honestly you know I think we're trying to accelerate the pace of doing that sort of testing but as you may know that sort of test would require going into human patients and going through phase 1 phase 2 phase 3 clinical trials so this is you know realistically it's yours another thing CRISPR could do in theory would be to edit our own genes and so that ourselves don't have receptors that allow a particular virus to get in is that a possibility well that's a possibility in the longtime future I would say it's certainly not something that will be I think effective in this particular pandemic one of the challenges to doing taking that approach is that one has to know first of all which receptor to to go after and we do know that for the for the stars to virus but there when when we talk about a receptor for a virus we're talking about a normal protein that's on the pregnant on the surface of a human cell and as you can imagine that could be problematic to try to remove it it's probably there for a reason so so that's one thing but then then there's also the issue as we just talked about for the the pac-man approach that one has to figure out delivery and how to target the CRISPR proteins to cells where they could create protective changes and I think that's again something that's going to take years to do we say it will take years didn't we just have a world famous case a year and a half ago where a Chinese scientist ha Joong Ki actually did that for the HIV virus receptor of a cell but he was able to edit the embryos of kids so they no longer had that receptor and couldn't catch HIV so you say it's a long time away but it's already been done for one receptor right okay well there's a lot of ways to answer that question first of all you know I think the ethics of that study were unfortunately very flawed and that study has been roundly condemned by the international community beyond that I would say that you know doing any kind of embryo editing is it's just impractical for multiple reasons both technical and ethical and and finally one we need to know in advance which proteins to target in the case of HIV we do know about the receptor proteins for HIV infection but for most viruses or certainly for emerging viruses in the future we can't necessarily predict when you put together a consortium that has various universities and philanthropies and foundations did you in this case say we're gonna have a slightly different set of rules about to the extent to which we're going to try to profit from or use this in a proprietary way and instead share it yeah actually that's a very active discussion because I think many scientists myself included we don't want to be we have no desire to profit financially from this we really want to be contributing our expertise and we're not seeking to profit from it we are working with university officials to see if we can put out put out publicly a statement about how intellectual property will be managed for this pandemic how we can make discoveries that are going to come from this large team of people that are now working on the problem you know openly available so that it can be developed very quickly and I'm optimistic that we're gonna be able to do that quite fast so stay tuned we're hoping to make an announcement about that in the near term dr. Jennifer Doudna thank you for joining us this evening thank you for having me [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Amanpour and Company

Views: 55,263

Rating: 4.7402015 out of 5

Keywords: CRISPR, UC Berkeley, Jennifer Doudna, Walter Isaacson, science, interview, CNN, PBS, gene editing, RNA, coronavirus, COVID-19

Id: XzRMcO0Pw6U

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 30 2020