First all-female nobel prize collaboration

The first all-female group of collaborators to share a nobel prize is the duo of Jennifer Doudna (USA) and Emmanuelle Charpentier (FRA), who were awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the development of a method for genome editing.”. The prize was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on 7 Oct 2020.

Women have won the Nobel prize for individual achievements before, but have never shared a prize without the presence of at least one male collaborator.

Doudna and Charpentier's achievement was the discovery, first published in 2012, of a gene-editing technique known as CRISPR-Cas9. This takes a natural virus-detection system found in bacteria and builds it into living cells to perform modifications to that cell's own genome.

The field in which Doudna and Charpentier work has its origins in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when biologists studying the genomes of bacteria noticed strange repeating patterns of DNA hidden within the genome. They called these patterns "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats", or CRISPR.

Intrigued by this discovery, other researchers started to examine the phenomenon. It was realised that CRISPR was a form of data storage – the repeating patterns were sections cut from the genomes of viruses, stored to help the cell's own defences identify intruders (like mugshots of known threats). The information was used by an enzyme called CRISPR-Associated Protein 9 (or "Cas9"), which would cut out these memorized sections of DNA whenever it encountered them.

Doudna and Charpentier's contribution was the realisation that this natural mechanism could be a powerful tool in medicine and research. They discovered that if you replaced one of the sections of virus DNA with, say, the gene that causes sickle-cell anaemia, the Cas-9 protein would search out and remove the offending gene. If the correct gene was then circulated, another natural maintenance process would find it and splice it into the cut genetic sequence, replacing a faulty gene with a functioning one. The discovery was published in a paper entitled "A Programmable Dual-RNA–Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity", which was published in Science on 17 Aug 2012.

Other researchers have since refined this process, making it faster, cheaper and more accurate, and the first CRISPR-based therapies are beginning to appear in the medical world.