CRISPRing through time: How cutting-edge technology is revolutionizing life sciences and medicine

Given the plethora of emerging technologies, none have truly captured the minds as CRISPR. From the groundbreaking research, the ultimate battle of the prizes and patents to a number of books, the science of CRISPR continues to be significant in the biomedical field. For many decades now, the emergence of synthetic biology as an intervention to correct diseases has become the foundation of biomedical research. Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)-based genetic editing has become a common place for routine investigation of scientific hypotheses in pre-clinical settings. More recently, CRISPR-based diagnostic testing kits for SARS-CoV-2 have showcased a translational output. Furthermore, a technological landmark was achieved when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first CRISPR-based gene therapy (exa-cel) to edit erythroid specific enhancer region of BCL11A in hematopoietic stem cells, introduced in patients suffering from sickle cell anemia to achieve durable remission. In this review, we provide a snapshot into the most important milestones along the journey of CRISPR from its discovery in bacteria to its usage in precision medicine. The intervention of machine learning tools has now intertwined complex biology with high-throughput scalable outputs. Given the vast amount of information on CRISPR, we try to pin down key take-home messages for scientists as well as non-scientist readers. This review article attempts to understand why and how CRISPR remains significant and seamlessly integrates in the emerging era of new technologies.