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Pre-Existing Immunity to CRISPR Found in 96% of People in Study

xconomy.com

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Re: Pre-Existing Immunity to CRISPR Found in 96% of People in Study

#31

Post by whatshisface »

nserrino wrote: post #28
chongli wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because you don't modify the genetics of terminal, living adults, you want to modify the genetics of single-cell healthy zygotes (who will, you hope, later develop into healthy adults).

Re: Pre-Existing Immunity to CRISPR Found in 96% of People in Study

#32

Post by dogma1138 »

bottled_poe wrote: post #30
amelius wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

With desktop gene sequencers becoming a near commodity product I’m not so sure.

There are a companies that currently focus on this area specifically by leveraging the ever dropping costs and capabilities of gene sequencing by developing targeted immunotherapy solutions that can target the specific genetic makeup of a tumor from a biopsy.

Re: Pre-Existing Immunity to CRISPR Found in 96% of People in Study

#33

Post by mbreese »

whatshisface wrote: post #31
nserrino wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is a CRISPR trial on a terminal patient any different than another experimental medical trial on that same terminal patient?

Because you don't modify the genetics of terminal, living adults, you want to modify the genetics of single-cell healthy zygotes (who will, you hope, later develop into healthy adults).

Sure you do. A lot of the promise of CRISPR therapies were for modifying cells in an adult or child. Using CRISPR/cas9 to “fix” a genetic issue in someone who was already born. For example for adding back a good copy of the gene that causes cistic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia. There were also potential cancer therapies based on the technique.

In these cases, the presence of cas9 antibodies is a severe limit to many of the techniques that these companies were working towards.

Re: Pre-Existing Immunity to CRISPR Found in 96% of People in Study

#35

Post by reasonattlm »

Immunity is the standard problem for most vectors for gene therapy. Viral vectors have neutralizing antibodies, liposomes get eaten by macrophages, and so forth. Minimizing this issue to the degree needed for a therapy to work is the subject of a great deal of effort over past decades, and ongoing today. It isn't a solved problem, but there are many incremental approaches that, when combined, can let therapies work well enough given good engineering and good fortune.

Re: Pre-Existing Immunity to CRISPR Found in 96% of People in Study

#37

Post by [deleted] »

nvahalik wrote: post #17
virusduck wrote: post #4

Actual 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.

[deleted]

Re: Pre-Existing Immunity to CRISPR Found in 96% of People in Study

#38

Post by Camillo »

nickelcitymario wrote: post #14

So 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…

It sounds like they can work around this with immunosuppressants. Which may be for the best... you wouldn't want random bacteria to be able to edit your genome at any time, would you?

Re: Pre-Existing Immunity to CRISPR Found in 96% of People in Study

#39

Post by dharma1 »

criddell wrote: post #27
nvahalik wrote: post #17

Earlier 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?

Hammers don't have unexpected, wide reaching consequences generations down the line, by which time it's too late to do anything about it.

Hammers don't also fundamentally change the course of evolution.

It's like comparing a slingshot with a nuclear missile

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