Lodz Contribution to the Nobel Prize

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for the groundbreaking discovery of CRISPR-Cas9, widely used now as a genomic editing tool that revolutionised medicine. Krzysztof Chyliński, a graduate of Lodz University of Technology, has made a contribution to this major achievement.
 

As it is explained by dr inż. Jacek Polak, professor of Lodz University of Technology, who lectures in genetic engineering at the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Sciences:

- CRISPR-Cas9 is a genome editing technology using a natural bacterial defence system against viruses that constantly attack bacteria. Bacteria defend themselves from invaders by cutting foreign DNA using CRISPR-Cas9, which is often referred to as ‘gene scissors’. This system has been developed and improved as a precise tool for gene editing by replacing a specific bacterial RNA fragment (tracrRNA) with specialised RNA fragments. They direct the gene scissors to any location in genomes, including the human genome. CRISPR-Cas9 significantly accelerates primary research in the field of genetics and is also intensively tested for the treatment of numerous human genetic diseases.  

This mechanism of controlled action on DNA and the principles of its use for gene editing were described in detail in 2012 and published in Science, a top-quality scientific journal, in the article titled “A Programmable Dual-RNA–Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity”. It was written by Martin Jinek, Krzysztof Chylinski, Ines Fonfara, Michael Hauer, Jennifer A. Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier. The research for this publication was carried out in Austria, Sweden and the USA. 

Krzysztof Chyliński, the second co-author of this landmark publication, is a graduate of Lodz University of Technology where he studied Biotechnology at the International Faculty of Engineering (IFE). He obtained an MSc degree at the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Sciences in 2008, having conducted a series of experiments in the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Poznań. After that he received a doctoral scholarship in Max Perutz Labs at the University of Vienna where, under the supervision of Emmanuelle Charpentier, this year’s Nobel Prize winner, he completed his doctoral dissertation, the research for which focused on the CRISPR-Cas9 system components. This great achievement is therefore a contribution not only of Polish, but also of Lodz provenance.