Cancer Diagnosis and Immunotherapy in the age of CRISPR.

The explosion in genome editing technologies that has occurred in the past decade has revolutionized cancer research and promises to improve cancer diagnosis and therapy. Ongoing efforts include engineering of CAR-T cells using CRISPR to generate a safer, more effective therapy with improved performance in immunologically "cold" tumors, as well as clever adaptations of CRISPR enzymes to allow fast, simple, and sensitive detection of specific nucleotide sequences. While still in their infancy, CRISPR-based cancer therapeutics and diagnostics are developing at an impressive speed and it is likely they will soon impact clinical practice. Here we summarize their history and the most recent developments. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.