654 people in the scientific community were surveyed in regards to future CRISPR research, ranging from executives and managers to scientists and researchers, with 65% directly identifying as either scientist or researcher. 87% of new CRISPR were found to be new to gene editing which reflects great interest and effect of CRISPR simplicity over other gene editing methods; 55% of those new to the process have near term plans to conduct experiments within 6 months; and 35% of the new researchers plan to conduct experiments directly related to therapeutics applications, with stem cell research representing 18%, drug discovery at 11%, and Car-T therapies at 6%, all indicating that the industry should be able to anticipate strides forwards in these areas in the near future. S. pyogenes Cas9 is the most popular of the various nucleases currently used by scientists for gene editing representing 81% and Cpf1 representing 14%.
CRISPR gene editing is gaining increase use and popularity among scientists, but there are still challenges with the process which were rated as editing efficiency at 64%, verification of edits at 57% and delivery/transfection at 57% as the main difficulties.
Synthetic RNA was shown to be used most by scientists to improve efficiency and consistency in CRISPR genome engineering with some misconceptions regarding the cost benefit, among those who don’t use synthetic RNA 42% felt it was too costly. However approaches to synthetic RNA has reduced high costs of synthetic RNA by up to 5 times while providing high purity and helping to enable breakthrough editing efficiencies of up to 90%, and reducing days of lab time required for plasmid cloning and IVT construction to minutes using synthetic RNA.
Companies such as Synthego are dedicated to delivering synthetic CRISPR RNA products with highest editing efficiency, turnaround time, at the lowest cost for scientists. CRISPR technology has become ubiquitous for conducting biological research worldwide, for scientist to increase rates of research and discovery tools such as these must be made available.
