Publications by authors named "Mutsa Takundwa"

Article Synopsis
  • CRISPR-Cas technology helps create personalized treatments for blood cancers by targeting specific genes related to the disease.
  • Some CRISPR methods are in clinical trials, showing promise in improving existing cancer treatments like CAR-T cell therapy.
  • However, there are still big challenges to overcome regarding safety, ethics, and getting the necessary approvals for these new therapies.
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Synthetic biology, precision medicine, and nanobiotechnology are the three main emerging areas that drive translational innovation toward commercialization. There are several strategies used in precision medicine and drug repurposing is one of the key approaches as it addresses the challenges in drug discovery (high cost and time). Here, we provide a perspective on various new approaches to drug repurposing for cancer precision medicine.

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Conventional approaches for treating tumors encompass chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and surgery. However, these methods come with their limitations when applied in clinical practice. Aptamers are often referred to as "chemical antibodies" and consist of short DNA or RNA molecules, designed to bind to a wide range of targets, including proteins or nucleic acid structures.

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This article provides an overview of microbial host selection, synthetic biology, genome annotation, metabolic modeling, and computational methods for predicting gene essentiality for developing a microbial chassis. This article focuses on lactic acid bacteria (LAB) as a microbial chassis and strategies for genome annotation of the LAB genome. As a case study, Lactococcus lactis is chosen based on its well-established therapeutic applications such as probiotics and oral vaccine development.

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In the past few years, development of approved drug candidates has improved the disease management of multiple myeloma (MM). However, due to drug resistance, some of the patients do not respond positively, while some of the patients acquire drug resistance, thereby these patients eventually relapse. Hence, there are no other therapeutic options for multiple myeloma patients.

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Drug resistance in leukaemia is a major problem that needs to be addressed. Precision medicine provides an avenue to reduce drug resistance through a personalised treatment plan. It has helped to better stratify patients based on their molecular profile and therefore improved the sensitivity of patients to a given therapeutic regimen.

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In this review chapter, we provide full comprehensive analysis on the patent, ethics and biosafety regulation with respect to the application of CRISPR technology in mammalian systems. We focused on recent development in CRISPR technology and its patent landscape between countries such as US, European Union, China and Australia. Further, we emphasized on the current scenarios on the ethics regulations with respect to CRISPR research, its applicability in patent and technology transfer.

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Adenylate cyclases (ACs), much like guanylate cyclases (GCs), are increasingly recognized as essential parts of many plant processes including biotic and abiotic stress responses. In order to identify novel ACs, we have applied a search motif derived from experimentally tested GCs and identified a number of candidates including a clathrin assembly protein (AT1G68110; AtClAP). AtClAP contains a catalytic centre that can complement the AC-deficient mutant A in , and a recombinant AtClAP fragment (AtClAP) can produce cyclic adenosine 3',5' monophosphate (cAMP) from adenosine triphosphate (ATP) in vitro.

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