Feng Zhang shares Gabbay Award for CRISPR research


McGovern Investigator, Feng Zhang. Photo: Kent Dayton

Feng Zhang of MIT and the Broad Institute, Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Emmanuelle Charpentier of Umeå University have been awarded Brandeis University’s 17th Annual Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award in Biotechnology and Medicine.

The researchers are being honored for their work on the CRISPR/cas system, a genome editing technology that allows scientists to make precise changes to a DNA sequence — an advance that is expected to transform many areas of biomedical research and may ultimately form the basis of new treatments for human genetic disease.