Pac-Man may be a classic title, but some new tech by the same name is making big strides to stop COVID-19. A team of Stanford scientists is repurposing their medical PAC-MAN equipment to fight the coronavirus.

While Pac-Man is looking to see itself getting a technological upgrade in the form of its addition to Tesla cars, this classic game's name is getting an upgrade on a biological level as well. The game's namesake is now being used to find a cure for coronavirus.

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The technology that Stanford medical researchers is using doesn't really have anything to do with the Namco game other than their shared names. In this case, PAC-MAN is an acronym that stands for Prophylactic Antiviral CRISPR in human cells, which originally used the gene-editing tool CRISPR to battle influenza. The Stanford research team has been partnering with those working in the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, called Berkeley Lab for short. These two groups have been working together on a way to effectively deliver the biological tech since March, when one of the Berkeley Lab's scientists came across a paper that the Stanford team published on the gene-editing tools' ability to combat COVID-19.

Pac Man with Power Pellet

The way that PAC-MAN gene-editing technology works is that it modifies genes so they can fight coronavirus more effectively. In order for those edited genes to help a patient, they need to be delivered into the patient's lungs where the virus has the greatest impact. Currently, the Stanford team of researchers is working with the scientists at Berkeley Lab to attach the gene treatment to lipitoids, which effectively carry DNA and RNA to the patent in a way that's proven to be helping against the synthetic coronavirus they've been testing it on. The researchers are at a point of positive development, and they hope to start moving the tests up to lab animals before PAC-MAN can be administered to human patients with COVID-19.

While this is not the traditional setting fans are used to seeing Pac-Man in, it's great to see the name making a positive global impact and helping more than just the gamers that love the classic franchise.

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Source: SciTech Daily