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FDA approves a CRISPR-based medicine for treatment of sickle cell disease

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Re: FDA approves a CRISPR-based medicine for treatment of sickle cell disease

#161

Post by BurningFrog »

hedora wrote: post #124
pastor_bob wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and another which results in reduced glucose and fructose content in the potato, That's pretty amazing. Imagine if we can change apples to produce Aspartame instead of sugars!

Unless you are diabetic, aspartame is much worse for you than sugar. It causes metabolic issues, such as reduced metabolism (leading to more weight gain than a subjectively equivalent amount of sugar), migraines in some people, interacts with drugs, is bad for your digestive tract, and probably has other side effects. Even if you are diabetic, you can already eat apples. They have a low glycemic index.

> * reduced metabolism (leading to more weight gain than a subjectively equivalent amount of sugar),*

Doesn't that mean aspartame somehow contains more energy than sugar?

I mean, assuming the increased weight is fat, that is stored extra energy.

Re: FDA approves a CRISPR-based medicine for treatment of sickle cell disease

#162

Post by feoren »

smt88 wrote: post #152
gen220 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I supplement protein, filtered for vegan because my body doesn't like whey, and Pea protein is pretty solid. It's a "complete" protein and doesn't require any complicated processing steps, just drying, pulverizing, and a centrifuge step to spin out the fiber.

Are you sure that's all they do? Peas aren't even close to 100% protein, so you'd be eating a very high-carb powder if that were the case.

I'm assuming that's the point of the centrifuge?

Re: FDA approves a CRISPR-based medicine for treatment of sickle cell disease

#163

Post by colordrops »

graphe wrote: post #120
mritchie712 wrote: post #25

Ohalo (the company Dave Friedberg is now CEO of) recently got approval for a potato edited by CRISPR: > Ohalo had two RSRs under consideration this year for its potato, one which focuses on higher concentrations of beta carotene – enhancing the overall health and nutrition value of the potato – and another which results in reduced glucose and fructose content in the potato, which, according to Ohalo, will reduce the…

I would have bred them for more potato protein. It's a very close meat protein substitute by essential amino acids. Might be why it tastes so good. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6245118/ >Of the ten plant-based proteins included in the current analysis, potato protein is the only protein source containing the WHO/FAO/UNU requirements for all essential amino acids. Thus, when consuming potato protein as…

I skimmed the article but it seems to contradict itself:

> Soy, brown rice, pea, corn, and potato protein have essential amino acid contents that meet the requirements as recommended by the WHO/FAO/UNU (WHO/FAO/UNU Expert Consultation 2007) (Fig. 2).

Re: FDA approves a CRISPR-based medicine for treatment of sickle cell disease

#164

Post by z7 »

MiddleEndian wrote: post #13

Lots of AI content recently (and I am working on AI-adjacent stuff myself lol), but I am most excited for upcoming medical changes. Cure every disease, then let people have designer bodies if they like.

Why stop there?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_suffering

Re: FDA approves a CRISPR-based medicine for treatment of sickle cell disease

#165

Post by CobrastanJorji »

eszed wrote: post #123
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a recessive/heterozygous thing. If you get the gene from neither parent, you're vulnerable to malaria. If you get the gene from either parent, you're immune to malaria and don't get sickle cell. If you get the gene from both parents, you get sickle cell. A hypothetical future person who's going to be born in an area with a lot of malaria would really want exactly one parent with sickle cell and one parent lackin…

Can they do sperm (or egg) selection to change those odds for IVF?

In fact yes! https://punchng.com/value-of-ivf-in-elimination-of-sickle-ce...

But practically, it'd be a huge challenge. Nigeria's one of the main victims of malaria and, not by coincidence, one of the main victims of sickle cell. There are IVF clinics in Nigeria, but they're very expensive even before you consider sickle cell testing. It likely wouldn't scale to all of the births per day, and something like a quarter of the country would need it.

But it's not IMPOSSIBLE. You'd need to do maybe 75 or so per day to cover the 25% or so of the country that have the gene and would need it. Hard and expensive and impractical, but perhaps possible?

Re: FDA approves a CRISPR-based medicine for treatment of sickle cell disease

#166

Post by graphe »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #119
lostlogin wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which is why this gene has not been bred out of the population over time. Is that why? Or is it just the people with it aren’t sick enough to die before procreating?

It's a recessive/heterozygous thing. If you get the gene from neither parent, you're vulnerable to malaria. If you get the gene from either parent, you're immune to malaria and don't get sickle cell. If you get the gene from both parents, you get sickle cell. A hypothetical future person who's going to be born in an area with a lot of malaria would really want exactly one parent with sickle cell and one parent lackin…

This sounds like Tay Sachs for Africans. Read that carriers of Tay Sachs might have defended them against tuberculosis, and they're also looking at gene therapy for it.

Prevention is the preferred method of passing this trait on however.

Re: FDA approves a CRISPR-based medicine for treatment of sickle cell disease

#167

Post by mpol »

BurningFrog wrote: post #161
hedora wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you are diabetic, aspartame is much worse for you than sugar. It causes metabolic issues, such as reduced metabolism (leading to more weight gain than a subjectively equivalent amount of sugar), migraines in some people, interacts with drugs, is bad for your digestive tract, and probably has other side effects. Even if you are diabetic, you can already eat apples. They have a low glycemic index.

> * reduced metabolism (leading to more weight gain than a subjectively equivalent amount of sugar),* Doesn't that mean aspartame somehow contains more energy than sugar? I mean, assuming the increased weight is fat, that is stored extra energy.

The idea works longterm. You take aspartame, which has a sweet taste but no energy. Your body starts all kinds of digestive functions and gets confused. After a lot of aspartame it doesn't know how to respond to sweet food anymore.

Re: FDA approves a CRISPR-based medicine for treatment of sickle cell disease

#168

Post by jryb »

sjkoelle wrote: post #91
joshuamcginnis wrote: post #46

Here's basically how the process works: * Harvest stem cells from the patient. * Prepare a DNA plasmid with the Cas9 gene, guide RNA for the desired genetic modification, and an antibiotic resistance gene. * Electroporate the plasmid into the harvested stem cells. Grow the electroporated stem cells in antibiotic-containing nutrient media. Only cells with the plasmid (and thus antibiotic resistance) survive. * Expand…

is crispr a big improvement here over AAVs or zinc fingies?

ZFNs are difficult and slow to engineer. There are certainly tradeoffs but the fact that almost the entire industry is using CRISPR-based approaches tells you where things lie on balance

Re: FDA approves a CRISPR-based medicine for treatment of sickle cell disease

#169

Post by ajross »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #156
ajross wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly are health insurance premiums "unrelated" to care outflows (what you're calling "expected loss")? Are you saying that health insurers books don't balance and that they're losing money (they aren't) or making too much profit (not unless they're criminally hiding it)? What you're saying doesn't make sense. There's no difference between health insurance and any other insurance in the way it works. You collec…

I meant the premium for a specific person is not related to their expected loss. For example, if you carelessly drive and get into car collisions where you are at fault, your premiums go up, because your expected loss goes up. In health “insurance”, it does not matter what you do, because your premiums are not based on your expected health costs. Hence it is more akin to a tax (or subsidy).

You're really not understanding this. That's got nothing to do with the insurance model. That's just a regulatory thing. All those choices do is change the specific population that gets insured in a single pool, such that their specific computed premiums are different. But for ANY such population, the total premiums paid == the total loss outflow + a reasonable profit. And you can tell that's true because the accounting for those companies appears in their SEC filings.

In practice, car insurers are allowed to partition their customers this way because it's felt to be "fair" and because it encourages safe driving. Trying to partition health insurance customers like that feels "unfair", and has minimal net benefit as health expenses aren't as controllable-by-the-subscriber as car accidents are. So we pass laws about how the partitioning gets done.

But again, "insurance" as a business model (and mathematical model) works EXACTLY THE SAME WAY. The only difference is how you draw the lines around who gets insured at what rate.

Re: FDA approves a CRISPR-based medicine for treatment of sickle cell disease

#170

Post by AmericanChopper »

z7 wrote: post #164
MiddleEndian wrote: post #13

Lots of AI content recently (and I am working on AI-adjacent stuff myself lol), but I am most excited for upcoming medical changes. Cure every disease, then let people have designer bodies if they like.

Why stop there? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_suffering

Why stop there?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca

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