Hello and welcome to the A16 Z journal club. I'm Lauren Richardson and today we're talking about a new approach to prevent viral infection

Specifically, we're discussing a recent article published in the journal cell

title Development of CRISPR as an

antiviral strategy to prevent SARS COV2 and influenza from the labs of

Marie La Rusa, David Lewis, and Stanley Chie at Stanford. Our discussion covers the differences

between this newly developed prophylactic antiviral strategy, traditional

vaccines, and antiviral drugs, how it can target a huge range of viruses and the next steps needed to go from

paper to practice. I'm joined today by A16Z general partner, VJ Ponde, and Bioteen partner, Andy Tran.

But before we begin, here's my summary of the article.

Profilectic treatments are those that you take before exposure to prevent infection.

In this article, the authors developed a strategy

using CRISPR-KAS as a prophylactic against coronavirus and influenza infection.

Viruses inject their genetic material into host cells which then hijack the cellular machinery to generate more viruses.

The idea presented in this paper is to use the cleaving activity of CRISPR-KAS to destroy viral genomes and thus prevent

viral replication.

As a reminder, CRISPR-KAS is a two-part system.

First, CAS enzymes are proteins that cut nucleic acids, either RNA or DNA.

In this article they were using a version of CAS called CAS 13D, which recognizes and cuts RNA.

This is appropriate since both influenza and coronavirus and customizable RNAs that guide cast to the correct sequences for cutting.

The authors called their system Pac-Man and it targets specific regions within either the

SARS-CoV2 genome, the virus that causes COVID-19 or the influenza A genome, earlier strains of which

have caused past pandemics such as the Spanish flu and H1N1 and is responsible for many

...