Emmanuelle Charpentier
Emmanuelle Charpentier
Title: “CRISPR-Cas9: Microbiology as a Motor for Innovations in Medicine and Agronomy”
Abstract: Over the past decade, research into the biology and applications of CRISPR-Cas systems has become one of the most dynamic and fastest evolving fields in the life sciences, with great promise for future biotechnical and biomedical developments.
CRISPR-Cas is originally an RNA-mediated immune system that has evolved extensively in bacteria and archaea into multiple systems, and whose function is to protect these micro-organisms from invasion by mobile genetic elements such as viruses (phages). Decoding the detailed mechanism of one of the CRISPR-Cas systems – CRISPR-Cas9 – has led to the development of a transformative technology in the biological sciences enabling rapid and efficient targeted genome editing and engineering, chromosome marking and gene regulation in a wide variety of cells and organisms. The RNA-programmable CRISPR-Cas9 tool is efficient, versatile and easily programmable and has been widely adopted by the scientific community. Originating in the evolution of the microbial world, the CRISPR technology now enables us to study the evolution of life in many other varieties of cells and organisms.
I will take you through the discovery of the CRISPR-Cas9 mechanism and its development as a revolutionary genome engineering technology and discuss the biological roles, mechanisms and evolution of CRISPR-Cas immune systems, as well as more recent aspects and developments of CRISPR-based genome engineering in life sciences and medicine.
Bio: Emmanuelle Charpentier, PhD is Founding, Scientific and Managing Director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens and Honorary Professor at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. Prior to her current appointments, she was Scientific Director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, Berlin; Alexander von Humboldt Professor, Department Head at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, Braunschweig; Full Professor at the Hannover Medical School, Germany Visiting and Associate Professor at the Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden (EMBL Partnership), Umeå University, Sweden; and Assistant and Associate Professor at the Max Perutz Labs, University of Vienna, Austria. Emmanuelle held several research associate positions in the US: The Rockefeller University, New York University Medical Center and Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, New York, and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis. She received her education in microbiology, biochemistry and genetics at the University Pierre and Marie Curie and the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France. Emmanuelle has been widely recognized for her groundbreaking research that laid the foundation for the revolutionary CRISPR-Cas9 genome engineering technology. She has received numerous prestigious international awards and honours and is an elected member of national and international scientific academies. She is co-founder of CRISPR Therapeutics and ERS Genomics, along with Rodger Novak and Shaun Foy.
Affiliation: Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.
