Prime Editing: An Emerging Tool in Cancer Treatment

Prime Editing is a CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) based genome editing technique having promising potential in terms of reducing off target activity. It introduces fragments of DNA sequences into the target site using a guide RNA (gRNA) molecule, composed of both the sequence that is to be inserted into the target site along with an inactive Cas9 nickase and a reverse transcriptase. Prime Editing can cause insertions, deletions, and various point mutations for reverting the phenetic characteristics of a disease specially tested in human adult stem cells and cancer cell lines. The main aim of our review is to explore how Prime Editing and its various forms are being utilized as an emerging tool to cure deleterious diseases like cancer, also as a delivery strategy of the tool into cells. There are almost five generations of Prime Editors (PE) with increasing levels of efficiency from one level to another that have huge clinical potential in correcting mutations; however, the necessity for a pegRNA design is extremely significant. But besides having such advantages, the limitations of this technology particularly include generation of double nicks while optimizing the efficiency of PE3. So, it is important to consider all such consequences and customize PE as per requirements.