CRISPR/Cas9’s Major Role in Revolutionizing the Field of Cancer

Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR/Cas9) technology is currently one of the most promising gene editing techniques. Gene-editing techniques allow various alterations to the DNA sequence by either addition, deletion, or inversion. The two primary components of this technique are the Cas9 endonuclease, which cuts the DNA strands at the specific target position of the genome, and the guide RNA molecule (gRNA), which guides the Cas9 endonuclease to that target portion. This technology is based on the adaptive immune system in prokaryotes, which prevents the entry of viruses by integrating short virus sequences in the cell’s CRISPR locus and allowing it to remember, recognize, and clear infections. The use of CRISPR technology in cancer biology is evolving quickly and holds great promise for the development of cancer models, blocking drug resistance, screening functional genes, gene editing, and CAR T cell therapy.