AstraZeneca (AZ) has announced research collaborations with four leading players in the sizzling new space of clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) engineering. Jennifer Doudna at the Innovative Genomics Institute, University of California, Berkeley; Kosuke Yusa at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK; David Sabatini at the Broad Institute and Whitehead Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Jon Chesnut at Thermo Fisher Scientific, Waltham, Massachusetts, have each partnered with the London-based pharma to apply the pioneering genome editing technology to the drugmaker's discovery platforms. The repurposed bacterial defense system known as CRISPR is enabling powerful studies of gene function, and through these partnerships, AZ aims to identify and validate new drug targets in preclinical models of human disease. For example, with ThermoFisher, AZ will receive RNA-guide libraries that target individual human genes and screen against cell lines to understand their precise role in disease. Key therapeutic areas for AZ are cancer, cardiovascular, metabolic, respiratory, autoimmune and inflammatory, and regenerative medicine.