ioCRISPR-Ready Cells^™

Effortlessly scale CRISPR experiments with iPSC-derived human cells

As ioCRISPR-Ready Cells are powered by opti-ox precision cell reprogramming, they have consistency and scalability built-in. With these cells, users can significantly cut experimental timelines by no longer needing to spend months engineering and characterising their own Cas9 stable iPSC lines or optimising differentiation protocols. 

“Using the conventional system of directed differentiation followed by transduction of Cas9 and gRNAs, we could only do about one genome-level screen per year. With ioCRISPR-Ready Cells, we are now able to do 6-7 of these screens per year. The model almost works too well because now we have all this data to process, analyse, and publish”

 

Emmanouil Metzakopian, PhD 
VP of Research and Development, bit.bio

Identifying druggable targets 

Using opti-ox powered glutamatergic neurons constitutively expressing Cas9, researchers ran a targeted knockout screen on 4401 druggable proteins specifically looking to identify genes involved in the unfolded protein response (UPR). This pathway causes cell death in response to excessive protein aggregation, often observed in neurodegenerative proteinopathies. A follow-up arrayed knockout screen of 188 hits yielded 13 targets that were subject to further assays, leading them to a single target KAT2B. KAT2B inhibition with L-moses led to a significant reduction in UPR-mediated cell death, offering a potential therapeutic modality for proteinopathies like Alzheimer’s disease.