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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]
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]
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]
He has an h-index of 85 according to Semantic Scholar.[19]
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