Juan Carlos Collantes is a molecular biologist and pharmacologist. He graduated from the Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology PhD program at Rutgers – Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. He is currently a Postdoctoral fellow at Dr. Victor Jin’s lab. His research focuses on the development of next-generation CRISPR systems, for therapeutic and biotechnological applications. Juan is coinventor of the modular CRISPR/RNA-aptamer base editing system called Pin-point™.
Base editing is a precision genome technology that can introduce targeted nucleotide modifications without the need to break the DNA to introduce these changes at the target site. This is achieved by the combination of a nuclease deficient Cas9 protein and the action of a DNA deaminase, such as a cytidine deaminase. During Juan’s PhD and postdoctoral work, he developed and engineered Pin-point™, a modular base editing system in which the effector and Cas9 are separate molecules that are recruited by a chimeric RNA molecule that encodes the CRISPR RNA scaffold (for Cas9 recruitment) and RNA aptamers (for effector recruitment). Pin-point has been successfully used to correct a loss of function mutation in GFP or install premature stop codons for targeted gene knockout on endogenous sites (Collantes et al., 2021).