Vaccines don’t work against some viruses. CRISPR might one day fix that

Two centuries isn’t a bad run for a medical technology. But while vaccination has prevented hundreds of millions of deaths since 1796, when Edward Jenner inoculated a boy with cowpox to prevent smallpox, there’s clearly room for improvement: Vaccines are risky or ineffective in people with compromised immune systems, they don’t even exist for several viral diseases, and flu vaccines, in particular, often fail in the elderly.

All of which gave scientists in half a dozen labs the same idea: Rescue one of the oldest biotechnologies with one of the newest — CRISPR.

In one study published last month, another posted to the preprint