A new treatment holds the promise of possibly curing a debilitating disease that disproportionately affects the African American community, sickle cell disease. Researchers from UCSF, UC Berkeley, and UCLA are teaming up to defeat the disease by changing the patient's genetics. To do that, they've turned to a Nobel prize-winning gene-editing technology co-discovered by UC Berkeley biochemistry professor Jennifer Doudna. Known as CRISPR, the system allows doctors to identify genes that cause disease and then replace them with new DNA - a process known as gene editing. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

Assistant bioengineering professor Patrick Hsu, an investigator at Berkeley's Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) is co-leading a massive UC Berkeley-UCSF joint effort to study more than 120 antibody test kits for their effectiveness in identifying people who may be immune to COVID-19. "These tests are widely available, and many people are buying and deploying them, but I realized that they had not been systematically validated, and we needed to figure out which ones would really work," Professor Hsu says. "This is a huge, unmet need for public health." Praising the project's enormous team of researchers, he says: "This is a huge, huge community effort. ... A lot of people really came together. One of the things I think is cool about this study is how many people repurposed themselves from what we normally do to respond to this pandemic." For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Stories on this topic have appeared in dozens of sources, including Yahoo! News and Science Blog.