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French microbiologist who identified the second RNA that CRISPR-Cas9 requires, co-authored the 2012 paper that made the system programmable, and shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Emmanuelle Charpentier is a French microbiologist who reached CRISPR from the study of bacterial disease rather than from genome engineering. Her laboratory identified tracrRNA, the second small RNA that the type II CRISPR system needs in order to work, and she then co-authored the 2012 paper showing that the system could be reduced to a protein and a single engineered guide and directed at any chosen DNA sequence. She shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Jennifer Doudna for that result, and has continued to run a laboratory on bacterial pathogens rather than on editing.
Charpentier was born in Juvisy-sur-Orge, south of Paris, studied biochemistry and microbiology at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, and completed a doctorate in 1995 on molecular mechanisms of antibiotic resistance, with the research carried out at the Institut Pasteur. She then spent six years in the United States — at Rockefeller University working on Streptococcus pneumoniae, then at NYU Medical Center, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and the Skirball Institute.
She returned to Europe in 2002 and moved repeatedly: the University of Vienna and the Max F. Perutz Laboratories from 2002, the Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden at Umeå University from 2008, and the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig together with Hannover Medical School from 2013. In 2015 she became a director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, and in 2018 the Max Planck Society established the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens with her as founding director. Five countries and two decades of moves separate the doctorate from the permanent position, and both of the papers the Nobel rests on were published while she was at Umeå.
The subject that runs through Charpentier's career is how Streptococcus pyogenes — the group A streptococcus, cause of scarlet fever, necrotizing fasciitis and a large burden of ordinary throat infection — regulates itself with small non-coding RNA. Her group's early work described an RNA that controls the synthesis of virulence factors in that organism, and the CRISPR result came out of the same programme: a survey of the bacterium's small-RNA transcriptome, run with Jörg Vogel's group.
That survey turned up an abundant small RNA transcribed from beside the CRISPR locus. The 2011 paper reporting it showed that this trans-encoded RNA — tracrRNA — base-pairs with the repeat portion of the CRISPR precursor transcript, and that the resulting duplex is processed into mature CRISPR RNAs by the host enzyme RNase III in the presence of the protein then called Csn1, now known as Cas9.1
Why the second RNA matteredThe type I and type III systems studied at the time process their guides without a partner RNA. That the type II system needed one was not predictable from them, and nothing about Cas9 could be reconstituted correctly without it. The single guide of 2012 is a fusion of the two RNAs this paper identified.
Charpentier met Doudna at a conference in Puerto Rico in 2011, and the two laboratories agreed to work out what Cas9 actually does. The resulting paper, with Martin Jinek and Krzysztof Chylinski as its first two authors, showed with purified components that Cas9 alone cleaves double-stranded DNA when supplied with the CRISPR RNA and tracrRNA, that the two can be fused into one chimeric guide without loss of activity, and that the cut site is set by base-pairing to twenty nucleotides of that guide next to a short motif in the target.2 The mechanism and its consequences are set out under CRISPR–Cas9.
Virginijus Šikšnys's group in Vilnius reached an overlapping conclusion independently, showing that a Cas9–crRNA complex from Streptococcus thermophilus cuts DNA at a sequence matching its guide. That paper was received by its journal in May 2012 and published in September, after the Science paper.3 The 2018 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience was awarded to Charpentier, Doudna and Šikšnys together; the Nobel statutes permit three laureates and the 2020 chemistry prize named two.
Which experiment is the inventionThe 2012 work was biochemistry in a tube. Editing inside human cells was reported months later by other groups, among them one led by George Church. Whether the tube experiment already contains the invention, or whether making it work in a eukaryotic nucleus was the inventive step, is the question underneath both the credit dispute and the patent litigation, and it has no answer that both sides accept.
Charpentier co-founded CRISPR Therapeutics in 2013 with Rodger Novak and Shaun Foy, and ERS Genomics the same year to license her patent rights outside human therapeutics. CRISPR Therapeutics and Vertex Pharmaceuticals went on to develop the sickle cell and beta-thalassemia treatment approved in 2023 as Casgevy, the first approved medicine using the system — an ex vivo cell therapy that requires chemotherapy conditioning and a hospital stay, and whose price places it out of reach of most of the patients the disease affects, as discussed under Access and inequality.
The clinical record beyond that remains thin. Delivery, not editing chemistry, is the binding constraint: in vivo work has concentrated on the liver, where Lipid nanoparticles reliably deposit their cargo, and the off-target and large-deletion problems created by double-strand breaks have pushed much of the field towards Base editing, Prime editing and Epigenome editing, which avoid cutting both strands.
Charpentier is a party to the American patent fight in her own right. The group opposing the Broad Institute is designated CVC, for the University of California, the University of Vienna and Charpentier; the Broad's applications, covering use in eukaryotic cells, were granted first under an accelerated route. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board ruled for the Broad on priority in 2022. In May 2025 the Federal Circuit vacated that determination and sent it back, holding that the board had conflated the legal standards for conceiving an invention and for reducing it to practice.4 Nothing about who invented what was decided by that ruling, which returned the question to the board rather than answering it. The dispute has now run more than a decade across two continents, and the American position has been reversed on appeal before; this article does not track its current posture, and a reader who needs the present state of the American patents should check the docket rather than rely on an encyclopedia entry.
The credit question is separate from the legal one and has its own history. A 2016 perspective essay in Cell by Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute, narrated CRISPR's development in a way that many readers judged to understate Charpentier's and Doudna's contributions and to overstate the Broad's; the criticism was directed both at the handling of the evidence and at the author's position at an institution party to the dispute.5 Lander told a US Senate committee in 2021 that he had understated the two women's role.
The 2020 prize was awarded "for the development of a method for genome editing" and was the first science Nobel given to two women and no one else.6 Charpentier is the less publicly visible of the two laureates and has stayed with the subject she started in: her Berlin unit is devoted to how bacterial pathogens regulate themselves, with CRISPR one system among several, rather than to genome engineering or its applications.
That distance is itself part of the record the field argues over. CRISPR arrived from curiosity-driven microbiology, not from a programme aimed at editing genomes, which is the case regularly made for funding basic work whose applications cannot be named in advance. The counter-observation is that the same tool has since made a set of governance problems urgent — heritable editing and its one confirmed clinical use in the He Jiankui affair, self-propagating drives in wild populations, and the dual-use questions that attach to cheap, precise sequence modification — that a laboratory studying streptococcal virulence had no reason to anticipate and no standing to settle. The institutions that must settle them are the subject of Governance of human genome editing.
paperDeltcheva, E., Chylinski, K., Sharma, C. M., Gonzales, K., Chao, Y., Pirzada, Z. A., Eckert, M. R., Vogel, J. and Charpentier, E. "CRISPR RNA maturation by trans-encoded small RNA and host factor RNase III." Nature, 2011.↩The work is bacterial cell biology; it describes how a streptococcus processes its own guide RNAs and makes no claim about editing anything.
paperJinek, M., Chylinski, K., Fonfara, I., Hauer, M., Doudna, J. A. and Charpentier, E. "A Programmable Dual-RNA-Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity." Science, 2012.↩Purified protein and RNA cutting DNA in a tube; the paper reports no experiment inside a living cell of any kind.
paperGasiunas, G., Barrangou, R., Horvath, P. and Šikšnys, V. "Cas9–crRNA ribonucleoprotein complex mediates specific DNA cleavage for adaptive immunity in bacteria." PNAS, 2012.↩An independent line of work on a different streptococcal species, received in May 2012 and published in September.
lawRegents of the University of California v. Broad Institute, US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, decided 12 May 2025.↩The court vacated and remanded on the standard for conception; it made no finding about who invented eukaryotic CRISPR editing.
statementLander, E. S. "The Heroes of CRISPR." Cell, 2016.↩A perspective essay by the founding director of an institution party to the patent dispute, so it records a participant's account rather than an independent history.
statementThe Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. "The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020." Press release, 2020. ↩