The three Tang Prize winners in biopharmaceutical science are to visit Taiwan next month to attend the award ceremony, give lectures and attend forums, the organizer said yesterday.
French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier, US geneticist Jennifer Doudna and Chinese-American synthetic biologist Zhang Feng (張鋒) will take part in “Tang Prize week” that begins on Sept. 22, the Tang Prize Foundation said.
“Laureate lectures” are scheduled to take place at the Howard Civil Service International House in Taipei on Sept. 24, one day before the award ceremony, the foundation said.
Doudna is to host a forum at Taipei Medical University on Sept. 26, while Charpentier is to host a forum at Kaohsiung Medical University on Sept. 27 and Zhang is to host an event at National Cheng Kung University in Tainan on Sept. 28, it said.
The trio were named the winners of the second Tang Prize in biopharmaceutical science in June “for the development of CRISPR/Cas9 as a breakthrough genome editing platform that promises to revolutionize biomedical research and disease treatment.”
CRISPR/Cas9 is a unique genome editing technology that enables geneticists and medical researchers to edit parts of the genome by cutting out, replacing or adding parts to the DNA sequence.
The technology, which allows scientists to target and mutate one or more genes in the genome of a cell of interest, has been touted as the simplest, most versatile and precise method of genetic editing available.
Related research in academia started as early as the 1980s, and building on these discoveries, Charpentier first identified that there are two types of ribonucleic acid (RNA) that guide Cas9 to the target gene.
Working together, Charpentier and Doudna demonstrated that these two RNAs can be linked together to become a single programmable guide RNA, which could then target any desired gene.
Zhang reported the first successful adaption of Cas9-based genome editing in mammalian and human cells. He further improved approaches for simultaneously targeting multiple genes and homology-based gene repair.
Charpentier, 47, is director of the Department of Regulation in Infection Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin.
Doudna, 52, is a professor of chemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Zhang, 34, is an associate professor at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Department of Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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