Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could this be a potential cancer therapy?
I like your silver-lining take on this. It wouldn't be bad low-hanging fruit to look at if someone hasn't already done that study.
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Pre-Existing Immunity to CRISPR Found in 96% of People in Study
21–30 of 101 posts
Re: Pre-Existing Immunity to CRISPR Found in 96% of People in Study
#22So to the non-geneticist noobs (like me), is it correct to interpret this finding as suggesting that the promises of CRISPR may be dead in the water? Does this mean all the hype was nothing more than hype? Should anyone with investments in CRISPR be seriously looking at dumping their stock? Should anyone who was holding out on CRISPR to give us super powers / cure disease / etc start drinking copious amounts of alcoh…
CRISPR holds way more promise than silly fantasies of human genetic enhancement. The most exciting and practical uses for it apply to challenging everyday problems: food, energy, invasive species, biodiversity.
Besides, the ethical problems with experimenting on human beings are extremely intractable.
Re: Pre-Existing Immunity to CRISPR Found in 96% of People in Study
#23So to the non-geneticist noobs (like me), is it correct to interpret this finding as suggesting that the promises of CRISPR may be dead in the water? Does this mean all the hype was nothing more than hype? Should anyone with investments in CRISPR be seriously looking at dumping their stock? Should anyone who was holding out on CRISPR to give us super powers / cure disease / etc start drinking copious amounts of alcoh…
Well CRISPR works in flies as some of the fly stocks have been switched from using RNAi to CRISPR for their gene edits.
Fly immune systems obviously are quite different. But the technique still holds a lot of promise. Like any cutting edge technology there are potential problems in developing it into useful therapies, and there is a chance something better will come along and displace it.
It is very difficult to edit all the dna of living organism as each cell has a copy. Easier to do as an organism develops.
Re: Pre-Existing Immunity to CRISPR Found in 96% of People in Study
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could this be a potential cancer therapy?
In a way, sure. A major roll of the immune system (especially T cells) is to monitor for unusual cells. Some pre-cancerous cells display unusual markers that are recognized and killed by T cells. Those that evade T cell recognition go on to be a problem. The major problem is still how do you target cancer cells? If you can find something that makes them unique, say a cell surface receptor, or an unusual metabolic pro…
> It's just hard to uniquely identify cancer cells.
How about performing whole-genome sequencing on a tumor, and then targeting the differences with the patient's natural genome?
Re: Pre-Existing Immunity to CRISPR Found in 96% of People in Study
#25CRISPR Cas9 is present in somewhat varying forms across many (all?) bacteria. I don’t have the quote to hand but I know CRISPR from bacteria that rarely or never come into contact with humans (think extremeophiles like deep sea thermal vent bacteria) doesn’t provoke an immune response, as it’s slightly different in form and novel to the human immune system. This is not a huge setback for CRISPR research.
Also you could argue that the title is misleading, as stating that CRISPR evokes an immune response is inaccurate; CRISPR from a bacterium that frequently comes into contact with most humans evokes it, and not all CRISPRs are the same.
Re: Pre-Existing Immunity to CRISPR Found in 96% of People in Study
#26So to the non-geneticist noobs (like me), is it correct to interpret this finding as suggesting that the promises of CRISPR may be dead in the water? Does this mean all the hype was nothing more than hype? Should anyone with investments in CRISPR be seriously looking at dumping their stock? Should anyone who was holding out on CRISPR to give us super powers / cure disease / etc start drinking copious amounts of alcoh…
Anything as powerful as CRISPR will most likely be misused and have a very high error rate/unexpected consequences initially anyway:
https://labiotech.eu/medical/crispr-therapy-cancer-risk/
CRISPR is definitely going to go through the "hype cycle" - as in the hype will die out long before we can prove it can be safely used in humans, and these achievements will likely happen in the background over several decades time span.
Re: Pre-Existing Immunity to CRISPR Found in 96% of People in Study
#27Actual article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-018-0204-6 This is perhaps not surprising, but still very disheartening news
I could be wrong, but this seems like a blessing in disguise. Maybe I'm just totally ignorant about CRISPR but from what I have read, it seems like this is totally wild-west/uncharted territory. This seems like one of those technologies that could have massive unintended consequences. Perhaps this is a _good_ thing rather than a bad thing.
When you see a hammer lying around, do you think of the things that could be built or the things that could be destroyed?
Re: Pre-Existing Immunity to CRISPR Found in 96% of People in Study
#28So to the non-geneticist noobs (like me), is it correct to interpret this finding as suggesting that the promises of CRISPR may be dead in the water? Does this mean all the hype was nothing more than hype? Should anyone with investments in CRISPR be seriously looking at dumping their stock? Should anyone who was holding out on CRISPR to give us super powers / cure disease / etc start drinking copious amounts of alcoh…
CRISPR holds way more promise than silly fantasies of human genetic enhancement. The most exciting and practical uses for it apply to challenging everyday problems: food, energy, invasive species, biodiversity. Besides, the ethical problems with experimenting on human beings are extremely intractable.
How is a CRISPR trial on a terminal patient any different than another experimental medical trial on that same terminal patient?
Re: Pre-Existing Immunity to CRISPR Found in 96% of People in Study
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could be wrong, but this seems like a blessing in disguise. Maybe I'm just totally ignorant about CRISPR but from what I have read, it seems like this is totally wild-west/uncharted territory. This seems like one of those technologies that could have massive unintended consequences. Perhaps this is a _good_ thing rather than a bad thing.
When you see a hammer lying around, do you think of the things that could be built or the things that could be destroyed?
I think "who left that hammer there?"
Re: Pre-Existing Immunity to CRISPR Found in 96% of People in Study
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a way, sure. A major roll of the immune system (especially T cells) is to monitor for unusual cells. Some pre-cancerous cells display unusual markers that are recognized and killed by T cells. Those that evade T cell recognition go on to be a problem. The major problem is still how do you target cancer cells? If you can find something that makes them unique, say a cell surface receptor, or an unusual metabolic pro…
> It's just hard to uniquely identify cancer cells. How about performing whole-genome sequencing on a tumor, and then targeting the differences with the patient's natural genome?
That sounds way more complicated (expensive) than using a minimalist signature to identify cancerous cells.