The US drug regulator has granted its first emergency-use approval for a new coronavirus test that takes advantage of the gene-editing technology CRISPR on 6 May.

The US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) emergency-use authority allows it to make tests and drugs available faster than usual in a public-health emergency. The new diagnostic kit is based on an approach co-developed by CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It will be used to test for SARS-CoV-2 in laboratories that are certified to provide clinical-test results.

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