[Research progress of CRISPR-Cas9 system for gene therapy]

The clustered regulatory interspaced short palindromic repeat-Cas9 (CRISPR-Cas9) system is the part of the prokaryotic immune system, which could recognize and delete the exogenous sequences originated from virus or plasmid. Based on its mechanism, CRISPR-Cas9 system was developed into the new generation of gene editing tool. Compared to the existed technologies such as ES targeting, ZFN or TALEN, CRISPR-Cas9 system is a more efficient, economical and promising approach to manipulate the genome. In this review, we summarize the research progress about CRISPR-Cas9 technology, especially the latest applications in gene therapy studies of human diseases.