Current optogenetic approaches require invasive surgical procedures to deliver light of specific wavelengths to target cells to activate or silence them.
Sonogenetics is a non-invasive approach to activating neurons in Caenorhabditis elegans.
Mechanosensitive and ultrasound-controllable T cells were further engineered to target and eradicate tumor cells with inducible chimeric antigen receptors.
CRISPR-Cas9 has been in the news a lot lately because it allows researchers to directly edit genes—either disabling unwanted parts or replacing them altogether.
But despite many success stories, the technique still suffers from a major deficit that prevents it from being used as a true medical tool—it sometimes makes mistakes. Those mistakes can cause small or big problems for a host depending on what goes wrong.
Prior research has suggested that the majority of mistakes are due to delivery problems, which means that a replacement for the virus part of the technique is required.