Figaro article – CRISPR – F. Moreau-Gaudry and A. bedel intervention

Pr François Moreau-Gaudry and Dr Aurélie Bedel of Team 8 – Genetic Biotherapies and Oncology (BioGO), specialists in the study of genotoxicity induced by CRISPR-Cas9 testify in the Figaro article of 20/01/2023 on CRISPR technology.
The CRISPR revolution keeps its promises“, headlines Le Figaro. Ten years after its discovery, the genome editing tool has opened up exciting prospects for medicine. « The applications of CRISPR are too numerous to list extensively »,notes American Jennifer Doudna, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who developed the technique with Frenchwoman Emmanuelle Charpentier, director of the Max Planck Research Center for Pathogen Science in Berlin. Jennifer Doudna publishes an article in the journal Science reviewing the last ten years of CRISPR-Cas9 technology. But as with any medical innovation, however exciting it may be, there are undesirable effects to be feared, or at least monitored. This is the expertise developed by the Inserm team of Prof. François Moreau-Gaudry and Dr. Aurélie Bedel (U1312 Biotherapies of genetic diseases and cancers) at the University of Bordeaux. « Very quickly, it was observed that CRISPR was less precise than expected: this is called the ‘off-target’ effect, i.e. the scissors sometimes hit the wrong target or cause changes in the chromosome,» explains Prof. Moreau-Gaudry. « This is of concern to us because these are molecular events that are found in cancer », explains Aurélie Bedel. This does not imply the suspension of ongoing trials, she adds.