Our Base Editing Cancer Study Awarded “Paper of the Quarter” by DG-GT!

We’re thrilled to share that our recent study, "A base editing platform for the correction of cancer driver mutations unmasks conserved p53 transcription programs," has been selected as one of the top three "Papers of the Quarter" by the German Society for Gene Therapy (DG-GT)!

What we did:

Using adenine base editing, we corrected cancer-causing mutations in TP53 – the famous "guardian of the genome" – and watched as the corrected cells struggled to survive. Transcriptome analysis showed that restoring p53 triggered a powerful, conserved program of cell death and growth arrest, no matter the tumor’s origin or co-occuring mutations.

But we didn’t stop there! We also fixed mutations in SMAD4, KRAS, and PTEN, proving our platform’s flexibility for studying how cancer cells survive and grow.

Why it matters:

This work establishes a new, powerful pipeline to dissect cancer mutations and opens the door for future mRNA-based precision therapies targeting cancer driver mutations.

Huge thanks to the team: Pascal Wang, Rituparno Sen, Frank Buchholz, and Shady Sayed – and to Genome Biology for publishing our work!

Read our paper to learn more about how base editing could change the game in cancer treatment.

Link to DG-GT Paper of the quarter website