CRISPR/Cas System: A Potential Technology for the Prevention and Control of COVID-19 and Emerging Infectious Diseases

Abstract

The continued global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) poses a serious threat to global public health and social stability and it has become a serious global public health problem. Unfortunately, existing diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for the prevention and control of COVID-19 have many shortcomings. In recent years, the emerging CRISPR/Cas technology can complement the problems of traditional methods. Biological tools based on CRISPR/Cas systems have been widely used in biomedicine. In particular, they are advantageous in pathogen detection, clinical antiviral therapy, drug, and vaccine development. Therefore, CRISPR/Cas technology may have great potential for application in the prevention and control of COVID-19 and emerging infectious diseases in the future. This article summarizes the existing applications of CRISPR/Cas technology in infectious diseases with the aim of providing effective strategies for the prevention and control of COVID-19 and other emerging infectious diseases in the future.

Rapid and Ultrasensitive Detection of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus Based on CRISPR-Cas12a Combined With Recombinase-Aided Amplification

“…In recent years, emerging nucleic acid detection technologies based on CRISPR-Cas developments have opened up new opportunities for pathogen detection (Peng et al, 2020;Zhou et al, 2020;Yin et al, 2021). Compared to traditional assays, the CRISPR-Cas system has low requirements on sample quality and strong anti-interference ability and can be combined with rapid sample pretreatment technology to extract nucleic acids in the field without relying on professional equipment (Ding et al, 2021a). It has been shown that a visualized and rapid detection technology of CRISPR-Cas13a nucleic acid suitable for the lateral flow test strip technology was established by modifying biotin and small molecule antigen FAM at both ends of the reporter RNA (Gootenberg et al, 2018;Ding et al, 2021b).…”

Newly Emerged Antiviral Strategies for SARS-CoV-2: From Deciphering Viral Protein Structural Function to the Development of Vaccines, Antibodies, and Small Molecules

“…Importantly, there are limited data regarding it as a therapeutic option for COVID-19. However, CRISPR technology has been proposed as attractive machinery for fighting against virus infection [ 132 , 133 , 134 , 135 ]. A CRISPR/Cas13 system was designed and reported, which showed a valuable tool to precisely edit the RNA [ 136 ].…”

The CRISPR-Cas system as a tool for diagnosing and treating infectious diseases

“…CRISPR-based systems can control viral genomes within host cells, making them unable to transcribe and replicate [ 63 ]. Therefore, CRISPR gene editing could treat chronic infections [ 64 ]. It is particularly suited to overcoming outbreaks of viral infections because their effective control relies on effective treatment, but also on rapid diagnosis to prevent disease transmission.…”

“…Rapid detection of asymptomatic infected persons is key to controlling the epidemic, and the nucleic acid detection technology of the CRISPR-Cas system opens up a new path in mass screening. Such as SHERLOCK (Cas13a), DETECTR (Cas12a), CDetection (Cas12b) and CAS14-DETECTR in a variety of pathogen detection applications [ 64 ]. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, research on CRISPR-Cas detection of SARS-COV-2 has developed rapidly.…”