Saniya Jassal

Introduction: A Microbial Defense Becomes Medicine CRISPR , short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats , was first discovered in bacteria and archaea as a natural defense mechanism against viruses. These sequences store snippets of viral DNA, effectively creating a genetic memory that allows the organism to recognize and destroy invaders. Over decades, scientists have harnessed this system to develop powerful gene-editing tools , with applications now extending into...

The Problem: A Heart That Can't Heal Itself Heart disease remains one of the world’s top killers, largely because the human heart has almost no natural ability to repair itself. When heart tissue is damaged, like after a heart attack, the lost cardiomyocytes (the muscle cells that make the heart beat) do not grow back. As a result, many patients face long-term heart failure, and even transplants are limited by donor shortages and rejection risks. Stem Cells Enter The Picture To overcome these...

In today’s fast-moving world of medicine, it’s no surprise that laboratories are beginning to reshape the way we think about blood transfusions. One of the most exciting steps in this direction is the RESTORE study —a clinical trial that, for the first time, transfused red blood cells grown entirely in a lab into human volunteers. Unlike traditional transfusions, this experiment used cells generated from adult stem cells, creating a small but history-making “mini-transfusion.” The goal? To...