Cancer is a group of diseases that is driven by genetic alterations, so called DNA mutations, which accumulate in our cells throughout our entire life. Over the past two decades, researchers have compiled a comprehensive catalogue of all the mutations that can be found in human cancers. This tremendous effort revealed, that out of the more than twenty-thousand total human genes, only a few hundred are mutated in cancer. The major challenge that lies ahead of us now, is to make functional sense of the identified mutations. This is where the recently discovered CRISPR system comes in. This game-changing biotechnology allows us to reversely engineer any cancer mutation into the genes of cultured human cells, in order to study the mutation’s functional impact in-vitro. In my talk, I will explain how we use precision genome engineering to translate genetic information into novel therapeutic strategies that will ultimately benefit patients that suffer from cancer. Michael Böttcher was born in Riesa and studied biology in Freiburg im Breisgau. He wrote his diploma thesis in Adelaide, Australia during a stay at the university there.
Since April 1, 2019, he has been a newly appointed Junior Professor for Molecular Medicine of Signal Transduction at the Medical Faculty of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. He is researching genes that are involved in the development of cancer in close collaboration with scientists from the institutes and clinics of the University Medical Center in Halle and at the Charles Tanford Protein Center at the University of Halle. So far, he has worked as a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, where he worked in the laboratory of Prof. Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier, one of the discoverers of the CRISPR / Cas method.
Among other things, the CRISPR / Cas method, known as gene scissor, with which genes can be removed, inserted, switched on or off, is used in his work. “I started doing this in 2014, when the method was still quite new, at the University of California, San Francisco, where I worked for three years, and developed novel CRISPR screen approaches that allow us to create complex genetic networks to examine functionally today, ” he says.Before that, he did research at the DKFZ in Heidelberg for several years, first as a doctoral candidate and then as a postdoctoral fellow. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx