Correct. You can also use CRISPR to edit a person's own cells in a lab for injection back into the person's body to combat a slew of diseases, including cancer. China is already experimenting on live humans: http://gizmodo.com/china-is-racing-ahead-of-the-us-in-the-qu...
AIDs, cancer, etc., is great, but what about male pattern baldness?
In all seriousness, what could happen for trans individuals? What would be the actual effect of replacing all cells' XY's with XX's?
And in a way penicillin is too good to be true, now that bacteria are widely resistant to it and many other antibiotics.
Penicillin probably saved at least tens of millions of lives, and other antibiotics even more. Yes, some strains of bacteria are developing resistance, but even today antibiotics are saving many many lives every day.
Can we crispr resistant bacteria to be susceptible to penicillin/antibiotics again?
Back in 2011, there was an announcement from MIT about a new approach to a broad-spectrum antiviral that appeared to work.[1] This goes way beyond an AIDS-specific cure. But it was at MIT Lincoln Labs, which doesn't usually do bio. So the researcher moved to Draper Labs, but didn't get much funding. Then that funding ran out. Now the guy behind this is trying to get funding on Indiegogo.[3] The problem seems to be th…
The expensive part of getting a drug to market isn't proving that it can kill cells in a petri dish. Lots of stuff can do that, bleach, hydrogen peroxide... The expensive part is the clinical trial. You try out the compound in the chemical woodchipper that is the human body, and see what happens. Almost all drugs fail at this point: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/01/23/i-d... >The timing of this r…
Huge amounts of the cost of clinical trials could in theory be cut by automating many of the tasks. A lot would be done if all computer systems across hospitals (and lab equipment) could seamlessly talk to each other, medical records were completely standardized and contained all necessary information in machine readable formats etc, not that I see this happening in the near future though.
I am very much in favor of genetic engineering and gene therapy in general, though I actually have mixed feelings about this. The old song "HIV+" by one-man industrial act Suicide Commando described the virus as "God's reprisal". Metaphorically, at least, this appears frequently to be the case; there is a downside to curing HIV. But I expect that success—whether or not this particular finding will carry over into a viable cure—will attract more funding and influence to a field that overall has very beneficial effects.
>There's a reason some ideas are left unexplored by industry. But your argument essentially boils down to "We haven't yet discovered an effective delivery method, therefore this technique will never work". Isn't that one of the basic problems facing all clinical genetic modification research? Is it unreasonable to assume that this problem could be solved by some future breakthrough, or does it somehow violate the law…
I fully support basic science pursuing crazy ideas. I think this is a very interesting piece of basic science, it's just at an incredibly speculative stage that's unsuitable for clinical investment. Efficient delivery of novel proteins into a cell by genetic methods, nanoparticles, or direct transduction is -the- challenge for a lot of novel ideas. Massive effort is ongoing to find breakthroughs here. The proteins in…
This is fascinating. How in the world does the body "raise antibodies" that are effective against arbitrary proteins it hasn't seen before? How does this get "remembered" and how does the memory get communicated through the body?
If there's an ELI5 (or, ELI-college-101) I'd be interested to read it.
I am very much in favor of genetic engineering and gene therapy in general, though I actually have mixed feelings about this. The old song "HIV+" by one-man industrial act Suicide Commando described the virus as "God's reprisal". Metaphorically, at least, this appears frequently to be the case; there is a downside to curing HIV. But I expect that success—whether or not this particular finding will carry over into a v…
I am very much in favor of genetic engineering and gene therapy in general, though I actually have mixed feelings about this. The old song "HIV+" by one-man industrial act Suicide Commando described the virus as "God's reprisal". Metaphorically, at least, this appears frequently to be the case; there is a downside to curing HIV. But I expect that success—whether or not this particular finding will carry over into a v…
What is the downside to curing HIV?
Degenerate behavior can't be punished with AIDS anymore.
It is worth noting that the real challenge in gene therapy at this time is not editing the genes, but in getting sufficient coverage of edited cells (and especially progenitors and stem cells) in an adult individual to achieve the therapeutic goal and make it last. (Most studies of genetic alterations in the broader sense have bypassed this challenge by working with animal lineages, or animals in which the editing ha…
This might be the biggest issue with CRISPR right now. The other issue is that we are not close to knowing what effect manipulating a single gene has on other areas. Especially if this gene is a switch for multiple genes.
Scientists are constantly performing RNA-seq analyses to determine where any given gene is active.
Penicillin probably saved at least tens of millions of lives, and other antibiotics even more. Yes, some strains of bacteria are developing resistance, but even today antibiotics are saving many many lives every day.
Can we crispr resistant bacteria to be susceptible to penicillin/antibiotics again?
Interesting idea. So you would first infect voluntarily with a custom virus that targets the bacteria by using CRISPR to remove the DNA strand of the resistance, then simply use the usual antibiotics to kill it.