CRISPR-Cas in Diagnostics and Therapy of Infectious Diseases

Infectious diseases are a major threat to the global health. The rise in antimicrobial-resistant organisms, incurable chronic infections, and an increasing demand for rapid accurate diagnostics have prompted researchers to experiment with new approaches. Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) and CRISPR-associated protein (Cas) is a naturally occurring adaptive immune system in bacteria that has been developed as a tool for performing genomic alterations in any genome of interest, including humans and microbes. Accordingly, several studies have been conducted to investigate how the technology can be utilized in infectious diseases to improve diagnostics, disrupt antimicrobial resistance, and cure chronic infections. This review provides an overview of the CRISPR-Cas system and how it has been applied in studies on infectious diseases. The review also investigates the current challenges of the technology and the improvements that are needed for the platform to be adopted for clinical use in patients.