The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

Circling back to the March 13, 2020, meeting mentioned in Chapter 1, Doudna’s team and other Bay area colleagues readied themselves to face an unprecedented challenge: the coronavirus pandemic. The meeting included colleagues from the Innovative Genomic Institute (IGI), a joint research partnership between Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco.

SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19, is deceptively simple. The simplicity helps viruses wriggle into organisms and hijack their machinery to replicate. In the case of COVID-19, the genetic material is RNA, Doudna’s specialty. One of the virus’s 29 proteins sits atop the virus shell like a spike, giving it its characteristic crown or corona-like appearance. The spike also acts as a key that latches easily into the ACE2 protein found in human cells. However, unlike the CCR5 protein in the case of HIV, ACE2 is a useful protein and cannot be eliminated from the human body. With the complete sequence of the COVID-19 available by early 2020, molecular biologists around the world began to research treatments that would stop the virus from latching onto human cells.

Berkeley decided to make IGI’s research on coronaviruses freely available to other researchers. Though the university would still file a patent for the IP, the work itself could be licensed for free.