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California may be known as the Golden State, but it may well be referred to as the Genome Editing state after this week’s announcement of an inter-state partnership. The University of California (UC), San Diego, and the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), founded by Nobel laureate and CRISPR gene editing co-discoverer Jennifer Doudna, announced a new partnership to jointly develop cutting-edge genomic tools for addressing large-scale challenges in health and the environment.
Doudna founded the IGI in 2015 with the aim of translating the success of gene editing in the lab into practical solutions for large societal problems. Initially formed as a partnership between UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco with a focus on using CRISPR in human health, the IGI expanded to include sustainable agriculture and climate change applications of genome editing, adding UC Davis as a partner. UC San Diego is joining as the IGI’s fourth UC partner campus, combining research strengths in environmental and marine science, engineering and computer science, and biomedical and life sciences to develop the next generation of genome-editing tools and applications.
“I’m thrilled that the IGI is now partnering with UC San Diego,” said Doudna. “The mission of the IGI is to develop solutions that can not only scale to meet the biggest challenges in health and climate, but to make solutions that are accessible to those who need them most. UC San Diego helps us expand that real-world impact.”
The relationship between UC San Diego and IGI research labs has been building over the past decade. For several years, the IGI has been collaborating with UC San Diego researchers Joe Pogliano, PhD, professor in the Department of Molecular Biology, and Kit Pogliano, PhD, dean and professor in the School of Biological Sciences, on applied microbiology projects. They have worked with UC Berkeley-based labs on developing new therapies focusing on “jumbo phage” for antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections as well as a novel defense strategy against viral infections.
In 2023, UC San Diego researchers were awarded $10 million by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to explore the biomedical promise of jumbo phage as therapeutic agents. Also in 2023, the IGI received a $70 million gift through the Audacious Project to develop microbiome-editing tools and apply them to problems caused by microbes and microbiome imbalances, including livestock methane emissions and inflammatory diseases like asthma. Other areas of the effort focus on developing more efficient tools for genome editing across a wide breadth of microorganisms to expand the impact of this technology.
In the environmental arena, UC San Diego researchers have worked closely with UC Berkeley labs since 2018 to develop tools for combatting crop pests, managing disease-carrying mosquito populations, and developing safe protocols for environmental applications of genomic technologies.
“UC San Diego brings exceptional strengths across biological sciences, medicine, engineering, computation, environmental research, and ocean science that align powerfully with the IGI’s mission,” said Pogliano.
In addition to the current collaborations, IGI’s executive director Brad Ringeisen foresees multiple areas of synergy: “UC San Diego’s strengths in engineering, medical devices, environmental research, and the microbiome complement IGI’s current research areas, and allow us to expand our societal impact in new ways,” he said.
New joint projects of particular interest include interdisciplinary programs designed to bolster the climate resilience of our oceans and soils through innovative scalable solutions, and combining UC Berkeley’s biotechnology discovery engine with UC San Diego’s biomedical research and health system to improve the drug discovery pipeline for rapid translation across areas like antimicrobial resistance and neurodegenerative disease.
The post UCSD, IGI Partnership Expands CRISPR Innovation Across Health, Agriculture, and the Environment appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.
Background: Dietary counseling is an essential complement to the growing use of glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1 RAs) to achieve sustainable weight loss. Diverse patient needs, the demand for ongoing support, and limited resources underscore the potential of using digital support tools. Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the usability, treatment satisfaction, and weight effects of a personalized nutrition advisor (PNA), a prototype decision-support tool designed to facilitate personalized weight management counseling. Methods: We assessed usability, treatment satisfaction, and weight effects of a web-based PNA prototype dashboard designed to help dietitians deliver personalized remote dietary counseling in overweight adults (BMI ≥28 kg/m² at pharmacotherapy initiation) who had achieved ≥5% weight loss with GLP-1 RA therapy over 12-weeks. The PNA dashboard generated tailored nutritional recommendations to help participants achieve personalized weight loss goals based on an energy balance model that estimated daily caloric intake and nutritional quality using frequent body weight measurements, dietary logs, and physical activity data from a lifestyle-tracking app. To evaluate the PNA’s usability, we used a convergent parallel mixed-methods approach, combining a validated quantitative usability survey and qualitative focus-group interviews and feedback questionnaires with both dietitians and patients, alongside patient-reported satisfaction metrics for PNA-guided consultations (treatment satisfaction, general self-efficacy, and perceived health impact). Thematic analysis with a hybrid deductive-inductive methodology was applied to qualitative data, using 4 a priori themes derived from this study’s conceptual framework regarding prior expectations, perceived utility and satisfaction, usability challenges, and suggestions for clinical integration. Percent weight loss during the intervention was assessed as an exploratory outcome. Results: Among 78 participants (58/78, 74% women), on GLP-1 RA (mean weight loss of −13.3%, SD 6.7%, after 10, SD 5, months of treatment), between 3 and 5 remote nutrition consultations were delivered with PNA support. After the 3-month intervention period, weight loss was sustained in all participants (−0.2%, SD 2.5%), with 21% (16/78) suspending the GLP-1 RA due to drug shortages. Dietitians rated the PNA’s usability as moderate (62%) on the Healthcare Systems Usability Scale. Patients evaluated the perceived health impact of the PNA-assisted consultations at 19.1 (SD 3.5) of 25 on the user version of the Mobile Application Rating Scale. No significant differences were observed in patient-reported treatment satisfaction (=.78) or self-efficacy (=.57) before and after PNA-assisted care. Qualitative analysis identified convergence with quantitative findings across themes of usability, treatment satisfaction, and clinical integration, with divergence observed for self-efficacy and tracking motivation. Both patients and dietitians found the PNA valuable for generating actionable nutritional insights. Conclusions: While effective implementation of tools such as the PNA prototype demands dietitian training and workflow integration, they offer scalable, personalized nutrition or lifestyle guidance—as a therapeutic decision-support tool within weight loss interventions, with or without adjunct GLP-1 RA pharmacotherapy. Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05997771; https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05997771
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Background: Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) affects 6.3% of Chinese children, but only 10% are diagnosed, as diagnosis is hindered by low awareness and lack of culturally adapted, objective tools. Existing continuous performance tests are unimodal and lack validity. Objective: This study aimed to conduct an initial evaluation of the diagnostic discrimination of BOKE STARS (Sustained Task and Attention Response Screening), a culturally adapted bimodal continuous performance test, for distinguishing children with ADHD from typically developing children in a Chinese clinical setting. Methods: In this prospective, single-center diagnostic accuracy study with a case-control design, 100 children aged 6 to 12 years (n=50 with ADHD and n=50 controls) were recruited at Xinhua Hospital between January and May 2024. Parents completed the Swanson, Nolan, and Pelham Rating Scale–fourth version (SNAP-IV), and children completed the BOKE STARS assessment on a tablet device under standardized conditions. Group comparisons were conducted using independent-sample 2-tailed tests or Mann-Whitney tests, as appropriate. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was performed in the full case-control sample to assess diagnostic discrimination. Sensitivity and specificity were reported descriptively across ROC-derived cutoffs; these cutoffs were not interpreted as clinically validated diagnostic thresholds. Secondary exploratory analyses included comparisons among ADHD subtypes and correlations between BOKE STARS indices and parent-reported SNAP-IV symptom severity scores. Results: Compared with controls, children with ADHD performed significantly worse on all major BOKE STARS indices, including errors of omission, errors of commission, reaction time, reaction time variability (RTV), discrimination prime, and total score. In the full case-control sample, the total score showed the strongest diagnostic discrimination (area under the ROC curve [AUC] 0.962, 95% CI 0.931-0.992), followed by RTV (AUC 0.919, 95% CI 0.867-0.971), errors of omission (AUC 0.884, 95% CI 0.818-0.950), and discrimination prime (AUC 0.819, 95% CI 0.737-0.900). Errors of commission (AUC 0.689, 95% CI 0.585-0.792) and reaction time (AUC 0.634, 95% CI 0.524-0.743) showed comparatively weaker discrimination. No significant differences were observed among ADHD subtypes. Several BOKE STARS indices were modestly correlated with SNAP-IV inattention and hyperactivity or impulsivity scores. Conclusions: BOKE STARS showed promising preliminary diagnostic discrimination for identifying Chinese children with ADHD in this case-control sample, with the total score and RTV showing the strongest discriminatory performance. However, because the case-control design artificially fixed the ratio of ADHD cases to controls, diagnostic performance estimates and exploratory cutoffs should be interpreted cautiously and should not be considered representative of real-world clinical diagnostic performance. BOKE STARS may serve as an adjunctive assessment tool to complement clinical interviews and caregiver-reported rating scales, but further external validation in larger and clinically heterogeneous populations is required before broader clinical implementation.
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