Dr. Gurumurthy elected to international transgenic board

Channabasavaiah Gurumurthy, Ph.D., director of the Mouse Genome Engineering Core at UNMC and associate professor with the Munroe-Meyer Institute, has been elected to the board of directors of the International Society for Transgenic Technologies (ISTT).

The ISTT was founded in Spain in 2006 and was incorporated in 2013 in the U.S. The ISTT currently has more than 700 members who share in the organization’s goals of increasing communication and technology sharing to enhance scientific research and to advance the field of animal transgenesis, the transfer of human genes into animals or cultured cells, especially to produce molecules with therapeutic value.

Dr. Gurumurthy and his team members, Donald Harms and Rolen Quadros, in collaboration with Masato Ohtsuka, Ph.D, Tokai University in Japan, have made several impactful contributions to transgenic and CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) technologies.

The most notable one among these is a breakthrough in genome engineering termed Easi-CRISPR (Efficient additions with ssDNA inserts-CRISPR). Easi-CRISPR is a highly efficient technology that allows scientists to custom-engineer important animal research models much more rapidly and at a significantly lower cost.

A short video of some notable contributions of Dr. Gurumurthy can be found here.

Dr. Gurumurthy’s term on the ISTT board of directors officially began earlier this month during the 15th annual ISTT meeting in Kobe, Japan.