Rett syndrome is a rare genetic neurological disorder that occurs primarily in girls, eventually robbing them of the ability to speak, walk or use their hands, among other devastating effects.

The BRIDGE Fund supports critical research milestones for inventions and discoveries that have high potential to change the course of disease and continues to grow, increasing from approximately $1 million per year in 2019 to $3 million in 2024.

PhD candidate Carolyn Kraus has received an award from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases to develop a CRISPR/Cas9 tool for designing a safer Duchenne muscular dystrophy therapeutic.

Six UMass Medical School scientists are among the members of the National Institutes of Health’s Somatic Cell Genome Editing Consortium to publish a paper in Nature outlining the program’s goals.

Investigators at UMass Medical School have received two, five-year grants totaling $13 million to explore how the 4D genome structure influences gene expression, cellular function, development and disease as it reshapes itself. Job Dekker, PhD, and Paul Kaufman, PhD, to investigate architecture of genome as it changes over time.

Douglas T. Golenbock, MD; Gregory A. Volturo, MD; Anastasia Khvorova, PhD; Erik J. Sontheimer, PhD; and Jennifer A. Reidy, MD, have been named to endowed faculty posts at UMass Medical School.

Led by Guangping Gao, PhD, and Erik Sontheimer, PhD, scientists at UMass Medical School will work to develop technology to enable safe genome editing in patients, thanks to new grant funding from the National Institutes of Health.

The pre-eminent international organization for RNA researchers has named Andrei Korostelev, PhD, the recipient of its 2018 Early Career Award, and Erik Sontheimer, PhD, its 2018 Mid-Career Award winner. Both are faculty of the UMMS RNA Therapeutics Institute.

UMass Medical School is competing in “STAT Madness,” an online, bracket-style competition run by the Boston Globe Media’s national health and science publication, Stat News, to find the best innovation in science and medicine--specifically, the discovery of the first off-switches for CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing by Erik Sontheimer, PhD.

Researchers at UMass Medical School and the University of Toronto have discovered the first known “off-switches” for CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing, providing much greater control over the edits, according to a new study published in Cell. Erik Sontheimer, PhD, led the research at UMMS.