J. Keith Joung

J. Keith Joung is an American pathologist and molecular biologist who holds the Robert B. Colvin Endowed Chair in Pathology^[1] at Massachusetts General Hospital and is Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School.^[2] He is a leading figure in the field of genome editing and has pioneered the development of designer nucleases and sensitive off-target detection methods.^[3]

Education

In 1987, Joung graduated from Harvard College with a bachelor's degree in biochemical sciences.^[4] He received an M.D. from Harvard Medical School and a Ph.D. in genetics from Harvard University.^[5]

Career

Joung is most well known for his work in genome editing and has contributed to the development of designer nucleases through protein engineering and assays for off-target detection.^[6][7][8] In the mid-2000s, his research was focused on creating zinc finger nuclease tools for biological research and gene therapy.^[6] He was the leader and founder of the Zinc Finger Consortium and co-authored a study on Oligomerized Pool Engineering (OPEN), a publicly available strategy for rapidly constructing multi-finger arrays.^[9][10]

More recently, he contributed to the development of TAL effector, TALENs, and the RNA-guided CRISPR/Cas9 system. In addition to demonstrating the use of the CRISPR/Cas9 system in vivo through the zebrafish model,^[11] he pioneered the creation of tools such as GUIDE-seq and CIRCLE-seq to detect nuclease off-targets within the genome.^[7][12] In 2016, his group became one of the first to report engineered high-fidelity CRISPR/Cas9 nucleases (HF1) with no detectable off-target effects.^[13]

He is one of the scientific co-founders of Editas Medicine, along with Jennifer Doudna, Feng Zhang, George Church, and David Liu.^[14] He is also a co-founder of Beam Therapeutics and Verve Therapeutics.^[15][16] He received the Ho-Am Prize in Medicine in 2022 ^[17] and the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy Outstanding Achievement Award in 2023, the society's highest honor.^[18]