University of Calgary Faculty Presentation

In May of 2018, our team held a informational presentation outlining our preliminary ideas and plans for researchers, doctors, and general interest groups at the University of Calgary. We presented a 10 minute pitch of our project, then opened the floor to questions, comments and criticisms from the experts in attendance. Some logistical comments were made regarding different transfection methods and whether to use wild type Cas9 or nickase. However, an unexpected yet repeated message from a few experts was the advice to stray away from gene therapy and instead focus on using our toolkit for gene integration. The argument was that gene therapy is filled with unknowns and hurdles, both physical and ethical, and navigating this landscape was not worth the effort when our system is readily applied to any gene integration applications within basic research. The main champion of this viewpoint was Dr. Ian Lewis, a professor at the University of Calgary whom we proceeded to meet with down the road, the specifics of which can be found lower down on this page. This presentation provided us with some tangible laboratory knowledge regarding ideal procedures and methods, however the more salient impact was the effect on our team direction. This faculty session was the first time that we considered pivoting from gene therapy, and instead focusing on developing a gene integration toolkit for broader application in research.

Dr. Ian Lewis Meeting

Dr. Lewis works as Alberta Innovates: Health Solutions Chair in Translational Health, Metabolomics and is an assistant professor at the University of Calgary. His work centres on connecting metabolic adaptation and virulence of human pathogens, developing new diagnostic methods and novel antimicrobial therapies. As an interested party he attended our faculty presentation earlier in the summer and provided initial thoughts on our project. He was worried about the difficulty of addressing a topic as large as gene therapy, and thought that the sheer amount of unknowns and barriers with such an endeavour would prove problematic. He instead counselled us to use our gene integration framework for generic research purposes. Later on in the project we met with Dr. Lewis again to talk about our progress and potential applications for our work. He was particularly interested in our projects applicability as a molecular modification tool, due to its wider usability into several fields of work. He thought the project could be used in complementation work in molecular biology and gene analysis as it pertains to functions in metabolic disorders (his specialty) in a eukaryotic, human context. Particularly, in his lab, work being done on DCMA syndrome (a metabolic disorder) could be advantaged by the use of a tool that allows for the knock-in of genes to characterize their function in the disorder. In a general context he described the potential of Snip, Equip, Flip as an “anvil”, whereas current technology such as CRISPR, could be likened to that of a “sword”. Emphasis put on our project’s usability as a tool for understanding biology further justified a shift toward expanding the scope of our project to become a toolkit for researchers, as opposed to a strict gene therapy system.