Copyright
©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Hepatol. Apr 28, 2015; 7(6): 859-873
Published online Apr 28, 2015. doi: 10.4254/wjh.v7.i6.859
Published online Apr 28, 2015. doi: 10.4254/wjh.v7.i6.859
Progress and prospects of engineered sequence-specific DNA modulating technologies for the management of liver diseases
Samantha A Nicholson, Buhle Moyo, Patrick B Arbuthnot, Wits/SA MRC Antiviral Gene Therapy Research Unit, School of Pathology, Health Sciences Faculty, University of the Witwatersrand, Wits 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa
Author contributions: Nicholson SA, Moyo B and Arbuthnot PB contributed to this paper.
Supported by The South African National Research Foundation (NRF, GUNs 81768, 81692, 68339, 85981 and 77954); Poliomyelitis Research Foundation; Claude Leon Foundation (SAN); The University of the Witwatersrand Research Council (BM) and Medical Research Council.
Conflict-of-interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Patrick B Arbuthnot, Wits/SA MRC Antiviral Gene Therapy Research Unit, School of Pathology, Health Sciences Faculty, University of the Witwatersrand, 7 York Road, Parktown, Private Bag 3, Wits 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa. patrick.arbuthnot@wits.ac.za
Telephone: +27-11-7172365 Fax: +27-11-7172395
Received: September 11, 2014
Peer-review started: September 13, 2014
First decision: September 28, 2014
Revised: December 16, 2014
Accepted: January 18, 2015
Article in press: January 20, 2015
Published online: April 28, 2015
Peer-review started: September 13, 2014
First decision: September 28, 2014
Revised: December 16, 2014
Accepted: January 18, 2015
Article in press: January 20, 2015
Published online: April 28, 2015
Core Tip
Core tip: The treatment of liver diseases is varied and often complicated. Gene editing is being developed to treat a variety of chronic disorders and has exciting potential for curing hepatic diseases. Engineering of derivatives of zinc finger proteins, transcription activator-like effectors, homing endonucleases and clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats potentially enables sequence-specific gene editing. These DNA binding proteins may be used to alter genes permanently or to influence the epigenetic status of liver cells for therapeutic benefit.