Twist Bioscience HQ
681 Gateway Blvd
South San Francisco, CA 94080
CRISPR screens have accelerated the discovery of important cancer vulnerabilities. However, single gene knockout phenotypes can be masked by redundancy among related genes. To address this issue we developed pgPEN, a pooled CRISPR-Cas9 single and double knockout approach targeting over 2,000 human paralogs. We applied pgPEN to two cell lines and discovered that 12% of human paralogs exhibit synthetic lethality in at least one context. We recovered known synthetic lethal paralogs MEK1/MEK2, important drug targets CDK4/CDK6, and other synthetic lethal pairs including CCNL1/CCNL2. These findings nominate drug targets to help expand targeted therapy options for cancer.