Jennifer Doudna

New Capabilities

IGI leadership; not directly an author on this study

Plants have used the same basic photosynthesis machinery for hundreds of millions of years — and it has never been particularly efficient, converting just 1 to 2 percent of sunlight into usable energy. Now researchers at UC Berkeley's Innovative Genomics Institute have published a method to systematically identify CRISPR edits that boost the output of key photosynthesis proteins by more than 30-fold, without inserting any foreign DNA. The two companion papers, published in Nature Biotechnology on April 8, 2026, tested over 30,000 mutations across the regulatory regions of three photosynthesis genes in sorghum, creating what amounts to a precision tuning guide for crop genomes.

Updated Apr 12

New Capabilities

Scientific advisor; Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020 for CRISPR-Cas9

Every approved cancer cell therapy on the market today requires the same costly bottleneck: extracting a patient's own immune cells, engineering them in a lab over weeks, and infusing them back — a process that costs over $400,000 and leaves some patients waiting so long their cancer outpaces the manufacturing. On March 31, 2026, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted accelerated regulatory status to CB-011, the first donor-derived cell therapy engineered to hide from a patient's immune system, after it produced a 92% response rate in a Phase 1 trial for multiple myeloma — a blood cancer that kills roughly 12,000 Americans each year.

Updated Mar 31