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.

As the list of available antibody tests for the COVID-19 virus soars, scientists and the FDA are investigating their accuracy and effectiveness. Only 12 have received FDA authorization for emergency use. Assistant bioengineering professor Patrick Hsu and UCSF microbiology and immunology professor Alex Marson are both working on the Berkeley-UCSF Innovative Genomics Institute's effort to study more than 100 antibody test kits for their effectiveness. According to this reporter: "To assess their ability to identify antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the team used plasma or serum samples from three groups: 80 people who had shown symptoms of COVID-19 and had tested positive using a PCR-based screen, 52 who had a respiratory infection but were found to be infected with another virus or had tested negative on a PCR test for SARS-CoV-2, and 108 blood donors whose samples were drawn in 2018 or earlier, before the pandemic began. ... Their assessment found that the ability to detect antibodies in people who had tested positive for the virus increased over time, rising to 81–100 percent when more than 20 days had elapsed since symptoms began, depending on the product. One of the members of the team, Patrick Hsu ... notes that this finding highlights why longitudinal antibody testing is important, given that a negative result may mean a person had been exposed to the virus but hadn't yet developed a detectable level of antibodies. On the specificity side, the proportion of false positives found in the pre–COVID-19 samples ranged from 0–16 percent. The agreement between the findings of LFAs and ELISAs ranged from 75–94 percent. The team posted its results as a preprint on the project website on April 24. Alex Marson ... cautions that some numbers, especially for tests' ability to detect antibodies in positive cases, may be revised as his team continues to analyze the data."

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.