Researchers at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, along with scientists from Yale and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, have developed what they're calling a breakthrough in the potential use in gene therapy.
The team has developed synthetic 'DNA switches' that can control genes in certain cells. It's believed the technology could ultimately be used to treat diseases such as Alzheimers and diabetes.
DNA switches occur naturally in living organisms. The Jackson Lab's Ryan Tewhey said to understand how they work, picture a dimmer switch for lights. Just as a dimmer can make a light bright or weak, or turn it completely on and off, DNA switches do the same for genes in cells. And Tewhey said the ability to control how genes are expressed can help treat certain diseases.
"My group, we wanted to ask, can we design certain switches for scenarios that the human body might not have a switch for?" Tewhey said.
The challenge is that DNA switches are complex mechanisms and have their own language that researchers have struggled to fully understand. But that's changing — with the help of Artificial Intelligence. Just as Chat GPT creates sentences, Tewhey said, AI models helped researchers create synthetic DNA switches.
"And so by doing that, we can show that we can actually write these switches to do what we want," he said.
Tewhey and other researchers have seen success using their synthetic DNA switches in a lab. It will likely be several years before the technology can be used in humans, he said, but it's a major step forward. Their research is published in the online journal Nature.
