CRISPR-Cas9 for cancer therapy: Opportunities and challenges

Cancer is a genetic disease stemming from cumulative genetic/epigenetic aberrations. Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)-Cas9-mediated genome editing technology has been extensively applied in various cell types and organisms, both in vitro and in vivo, for efficient gene disruption and gene modification. CRISPR-Cas9 has shown great promise for the treatment of cancer. However, despite its advantages and tremendous potential, numerous challenges, such as fitness of edited cells, editing efficiency, delivery methods and potential off-target effects, remain to be solved for completely clinical application. Here, we present the potential applications and recent advances of CRISPR-Cas9 in cancer therapy, and discuss the challenges that might be encountered in clinical applications.