The Nascent CRISPR-Cas9 Patent Landscape In Canada

CRISPR-Cas9 is a technology with the potential for an unimaginable impact on society. CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) allows scientists to edit genomes in living organisms at the cellular level by guiding a "scissor-like" protein to targeted sections of DNA within a cell, and then prompting it to alter or "edit" the DNA in some way. Potential uses already in the pipeline include improving immunity to cancer, curing AIDS by extracting HIV from human immune cells, building muscle in muscular dystrophy patients and replacing antibiotics as a strategy to combat bacterial infections. These applications just scratch the surface of already-explored medical uses. The possibilities, both inside and outside medicine, are truly endless.