Tracking Cancer with CRISPR Technology

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Univ. of California San Francisco (UCSF) have developed a method to track cancer metastasis using CRISPR technology, in an attempt to better understand the disease.

Perhaps one of the deadliest qualities of cancer is its ability to metastasize, or spread rapidly throughout the body. However, the moment in which tumor cells split from the primary tumor and spread to other areas is extremely difficult to ascertain — in this way, cancer can take root and then ravage the body, undetected until it is too late.

“Metastatic cancers are often the most deadly and difficult to treat, due to the systemic nature of the disease,” says Matthew Jones, a researcher at UCSF. “Despite metastasis being so important for disease progression, however, it’s extremely hard to monitor because metastatic events are rare, stochastic, and transient. Moreover, there is a scarcity of tools for studying the relationships between metastases and primary tumors and thereby extracting insights into how metastatic spread occurs.”

Currently, the most powerful tool to track metastasis is studying the relationship between dispersed tumor cells and their primary tumor cells — comparing shared genetic differences and mutations between the primary tumor and metastatic sites can help scientists assemble a sequence of events. It is possible to understand how cells split from different parts of...