The Gene Editing program uses state-of-the-art molecular genetic technology to understand the pathology of and develop new therapies for relatively common genetic diseases such as childhood epilepsy, muscular dystrophy and blindness.

The technology is called ‘Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats’, or CRISPR for short. It acts like ‘genetic scissors’, able to cut DNA strands in specific locations to remove harmful genetic instructions or add beneficial ones.

This program is also home to the South Australian Genome Editing (SAGE) Facility which is a commercial service that can produce genetically modified mice for modelling disease-causing mutations in humans.