Back

Selective Elimination of TP53 Mutant Cells by Transcript-Activated Chromatin Shredding

Zeng, J.; Cheng, Z.; Chen, H.; Thompson, J.; Crosby, K. T.; Hang, H.; Ngo, W.; Xia, C.; Rosas-Rivera, D.; Kang, M. H.; Mao, Y.; Lee, G.; Diffley, J. F. X.; Song, Y.; Qiu, L.; Krah, N. M.; Murthy, N.; Jackson, R. N.; Liu, Y.; Ashworth, A.; Doudna, J. A.

2026-05-09 cell biology
10.64898/2026.05.08.723607 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Genetic mutations that drive cancer often occur in tumor suppressor proteins, including the p53 transcription factor which is altered in [~]40-50% of cases1,2. However, current therapies fail to target most such mutations because the mutant proteins typically lack defined drug-binding pockets, and restoring the endogenous function has proven challenging. Here, we programmed CRISPR-Cas12a2, an RNA-guided nuclease with trans-nucleolytic cleavage activities3,4, to selectively kill cancer cells by targeting cancer-specific transcripts. This approach eliminates cells by inducing trans chromatin cleavage, triggering DNA damage and cell death. Unlike existing methods, RNA-guided Cas12a2 senses cellular RNA signatures to shred chromatin, enabling precise targeting of undruggable mutations. Transcript-activated chromatin shredding provides an innovative paradigm to develop precision disease treatments for undruggable targets.

Published in Nature (predicted rank #2) · training set

Matching journals

The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.