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CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array of diseases

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Re: CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array of diseases

#231

Post by nojokes »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #125
amelius wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before getting too excited, let's not forget the stories where gene therapy went horribly wrong. https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/the-death-of-je... > Doudna expressed similar concerns about CRISPR. > “I hope that we don’t get ahead of ourselves with this technology. As exciting as it is, I really would like to see . . . people take a very measured and responsible path forward, where there’s careful vetti…

> “We were all very much aware of what happened there and what a tragedy that was,” she said in a recent interview. “That made the whole field of gene therapy go away, mostly, for at least a decade. Damn this sucks to read. To think of how much progress we might have made in a promising field if we could just get over one person dying. Yes it's awful, and we shouldn't be flippant, but we're talking about work to help…

Well, in some situations we are doing this. For example even when some vaccines happen to kill some small number of people, it has been argued that in current situation it is still net positive.

Re: CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array of diseases

#232

Post by DrAwdeOccarim »

7thaccount wrote: post #224
DrAwdeOccarim wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am bullish on the tech, but don't forget about how swords have two edges...there are going to be some crazy new exploits in our biology this technology will be able to take advantage of. Slipping genetic information past immune sentinels is going to have some crazy downstream risks we are just beginning to fathom.

I watched a pretty good PBS-NOVA special on CRISPR recently that covered this. It seems like the scientists interviewed (some of them leaders in CRISPR) were of the opinion that we should stay the hell away from editing the human germ line (not sure if I used the right term, but basically stuff that would be passed to offspring).

I'm not even just talking about CRISPR. mRNA-LNP is like a flash drive that bypasses anti-virus software. The opportunities are...dramatic.

Re: CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array of diseases

#233

Post by nr2x »

kortilla wrote: post #159
nr2x wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At current rates of carbon outlay, there won’t be much of a world left to save in 100 years.

That statement isn’t backed by science

“We are currently on track for a rise of between 6.3° and 13.3°F, with a high probability of an increase of 9.4°F by 2100”

https://www.climatecentral.org/news/ipcc-predictions-then-ve...

Re: CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array of diseases

#234

Post by prawn »

_meqs wrote: post #164
nitrogen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop with the doom trolling and get busy inventing solutions.

Here's my controversial opinion - the best individual solution is to do less stuff. To me, it doesn't make sense that a problem caused by over-zealous production will be solved by over-zealous production. We can't really expect making more stuff to solve our problems caused by making too much stuff. The new stuff we make should be targeted at increasing the efficiency of production, but, while helpful, I can't help b…

And this is a reason we're really up against it in facing this challenge. Every ounce of advertising being thrown at people is trying to convince them to do the opposite - buy more, eat more, travel more, etc. And no government can work against that or they'll be reverted by lobbyists or destroyed by industry campaigns.

Same reason people struggle to manage their weight. There's no money in convincing people of the cheap/easy solution to buy and eat less. The pitches are always gyms and diets of specific foods and quick fixes. You don't see an article about a very reasonable size of hamburger or normal steak pancakes - it's always the 1kg steak or world-record pizza or a burger that you go on the honour wall if you complete. We're unsatisfied by small meals, they don't seem like value for money; tiny meals at high-end restaurants get ridiculed by the masses.

Re: CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array of diseases

#235

Post by systoll »

esperent wrote: post #174
puchatek wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If eating GMOs has you scared, this should be absolutely terrifying

So if I'm fine with GMO food (and medicine), by extension I'll fine with this. ... Or is that a logical fallacy?

That’d be a logical fallacy: Denying the antecedent.

If your program won’t compile, it has a bug somewhere.

If your program will compile, it almost certainly still has a bug somewhere.

Re: CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array of diseases

#236

Post by pas »

siver_john wrote: post #148
trhway wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expected we would be doing this using viruses, and there are viruses targeting various tissues/organs. The nanites though are just really Star Trek cool.

While nanoparticles could correspond to viral like carriers. The reason you probably wouldn't want to naively use viral particles is because any viral particle that would likely attack the body naturally would also trigger the immune system. That would decrease the efficacy and could actually increase the likelihood of side effects.

Are these nano particles similar to the Pfizer vaccine ones? Those lipid nanoparticles do trigger the immune system.

Re: CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array of diseases

#237

Post by pas »

null_object wrote: post #189
alex_sf wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All crops are GMO. The only difference is how fast they were modified.

> All crops are GMO. The only difference is how fast they were modified. This is often said in defense of GMO, but surely cross-breeding and hybridization - a farmer or gardener attempting to combine the entire genetic entity of one plant with another one (which must therefore be naturally compatible), to increase the potential utility of the result - is totally different to inserting a single gene from a totally arb…

With enough time that trait would show up by simple selective breeding too. GMO does it faster. (Of course so much faster that there is an argument that it's qualitatively not the same as good old breeding. And if someone comes up with some kind of killer trees that release anthrax in the spring that too counts as GMO too, but they are unlikely to be deterred by labeling requirements or GMO bans.)

Re: CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array of diseases

#238

Post by pas »

mrfusion wrote: post #209

Can anyone explain how this survives being in the blood stream and then how it actually gets into the nucleus of the cell?

Very similar to how a virion (virus particle) and its "payload". Here a lipid nanoparticle coats the genetic material. The exact chemistry used is highly selective to liver cells (so most of the particles will end up fusing with a liver cell), then inside the cell some enzyme or similar but more complicated molecular machinery (these usually have names ending in -ase, like protease, nuclease) unwraps it. Then it has special markers which signal that it needs transport to the nucleus. See NLS [0]. There CRISPR does its magic. The guide is the genetic pattern matcher. The big limitation is the length of this guide. The longer it is the safer it can be.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/post/How-does-the-CRISPR-guideR...

Re: CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array of diseases

#239

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

ausbah wrote: post #43

>Doctors infused billions of microscopic structures known as nanoparticles carrying genetic instructions for the CRISPR gene-editor into four patients in London and two in New Zealand. The nanoparticles were absorbed by their livers, where they unleashed armies of CRISPR gene-editors. The CRISPR editor honed in on the target gene in the liver and sliced it, disabling production of the destructive protein. this is one…

to me it sounds like McCoy from Star Trek telling our doctors that they are from the dark ages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R_WbAhKyAk

Re: CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array of diseases

#240

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #161

Wikipedia says that they first used viruses as delivery agents; now it's nanoparticles, aparently to avoid destruction by the immune system. Also interesting that CRISPR gene editing was also the subject of a patent war. Amazing stuff... (also it took them less than a year to adopt the nanoparticle trick to CRISPR gene editing. Things are moving fast) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR_gene_editing https://news.har…

here is a better link: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/06/crispr-injected-bloo... they say that they are using lipid nanoparticles, that's the same stuff that is used in the Moderna and Phizer covid vaccines. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037851732... We are living in the twenty first century...
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