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Researchers have published successes with using CRISPR to treat animals with an inherited liver disease and muscular dystrophy, and there will be more such preclinical reports at the annual meeting of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy (ASGCT). The buzz around CRISPR is growing. This year’s meeting includes 93 abstracts on CRISPR (of 768 total), compared with only 33 last year. What’s more, investors are flocking to CRISPR. Three startups, Editas Medicine, Intellia Therapeutics, and CRISPR Therapeutics, have already attracted hundreds of millions of dollars.
But CRISPR still has a long way to go before it can be used safely and effectively to repair—not just disrupt—genes in people. That is particularly true for most diseases, such as muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis, which require correcting genes in a living person because if the cells were first removed and repaired then put back, too few would survive. And the need to treat cells inside the body means gene editing faces many of the same delivery challenges as gene transfer—researchers must devise efficient ways to get a working CRISPR into specific tissues in a person, for example.
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CRISPR also poses its own safety risks. Most often mentioned is that the Cas9 enzyme that CRISPR uses to cleave DNA at a specific location could also make cuts where it’s not intended to, potentially causing cancer.
Read full, original post: The gene editor CRISPR won’t fully fix sick people anytime soon. Here’s why
