On Dec. 2, 2024, engineers in the University of Southern Califoronia (USC) Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering announced an updated tool that allows CRISPR technology to be more powerful with the help of focused ultrasound.

CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a Nobel Prize-winning gene-editing tool, already widely used by scientists to cut and modify DNA sequences to turn genes on and off or insert new DNA that can correct abnormalities. CRISPR uses an enzyme known as Cas9 to cut and alter DNA.

The resulting toolkit will allow CRISPR gene editing to be precisely targeted to the specific areas requiring treatment. The research team is applying this discovery to refine their work in cancer immunotherapy. The study was published in Nature Communications.