top of page
IMG_0344.HEIC

Research

Almost every disease has a genetic component. Often this information is used only to determine how condemned a person is to develop disease.

​

We would like to use the genetic information to fix the disease. A guiding principle for our work has been to study how nature does what it does, then attempt to use that knowledge to make useful tools to improve public health, either through increased knowledge or therapeutic intervention.

 

Specific research foci in the Segal Lab revolve around engineering zinc finger, TALE, and CRISPR/Cas nucleases and transcription factors.

We also continue to make methodological improvements, many of which have been widely adapted in the field.

.

Latest Publications involving the Segal Lab
 

The NIH Somatic Cell Genome Editing program

The move from reading to writing the human genome offers new opportunities to improve human health. The United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) Somatic Cell Genome Editing (SCGE) Consortium aims to accelerate the development of safer and more-effective methods to edit the genomes of disease-relevant somatic cells in patients, even in tissues that are difficult to reach. Here we discuss the consortium's plans to develop and benchmark approaches to induce and measure genome modifications, and to define downstream functional consequences of genome editing within human cells. Central to this effort is a rigorous and innovative approach that requires validation of the technology through third-party testing in small and large animals. New genome editors, delivery technologies and methods for tracking edited cells in vivo, as well as newly developed animal models and human biological systems, will be assembled-along with validated datasets-into an SCGE Toolkit, which will be disseminated widely to the biomedical research community. We visualize this toolkit-and the knowledge generated by its applications-as a means to accelerate the clinical development of new therapies for a wide range of conditions.

See more here.

bottom of page