title: RNA-guided endonuclease provides a therapeutic strategy to cure latent herpesviridae infection.
abstract: Latent viral infection is a persistent cause of human disease. Although standard antiviral therapies can suppress active viral replication, no existing treatment can effectively eradicate latent infection and therefore a cure is lacking for many prevalent viral diseases. The prokaryotic immune system clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR)/Cas evolved as a natural response to phage infections, and we demonstrate here that the CRISPR/Cas9 system can be adapted for antiviral treatment in human cells by specifically targeting the genomes of latent viral infections. Patient-derived cells from a Burkitt's lymphoma with latent Epstein-Barr virus infection showed dramatic proliferation arrest and a concomitant decrease in viral load after exposure to a CRISPR/Cas9 vector targeted to the viral genome.
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioengineering.
authors.forename: Jianbin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioengineering, Department of Applied Physics, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 quake@stanford.edu.
authors.forename: Stephen R
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Quake
mesh_terms: D001483:Base Sequence; D064113:CRISPR-Cas Systems / Q000235:genetics; D045744:Cell Line, Tumor; D049109:Cell Proliferation; D064112:Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats / Q000235:genetics; D004720:Endonucleases / Q000627:therapeutic use*; D020031:Epstein-Barr Virus Infections / Q000188:drug therapy* / Q000473:pathology / Q000821:virology; D016679:Genome, Viral / Q000235:genetics; D004854:Herpesvirus 4, Human / Q000235:genetics; D006801:Humans; D008954:Models, Biological; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D017393:RNA Editing / Q000235:genetics; D000094704:RNA, Guide, CRISPR-Cas Systems / Q000378:metabolism*; D017384:Sequence Deletion
chemical_list: D000094704:RNA, Guide, CRISPR-Cas Systems; D004720:Endonucleases
keywords: genome editing; herpes virus; latency