3 ms·
If you are imagining having something injected into you and your cells being "edited" in situ, I doubt it can happen with this tech. The process is very toxic t
by nonbel 10y ago
If you are imagining having something injected into you and your cells being "edited" in situ, I doubt it can happen with this tech. The process is very toxic to cells in every paper that reports that aspect. You will only see them remove the cells, "edit" them in a dish, then inject them back in.
I even suspect a major portion of the "editing" is not editing at all, but rather selecting for the small number of pre-existing cells that are mutants at any site. This works because the mutants are "immune" due to lacking the recognition sequence.
Then again, I haven't read a paper on it in awhile now (and the ones posted here seem to be mostly editorials nowadays), so maybe they figured something out.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dekhn 10y ago"The process is very toxic to cells...." you mean like chemotherapy?
- nonbel 10y agoYes, the way CRISPR/Cas9 works, the DNA must be damaged. However, chemotherapy is not very selective about which cells it damages. Here, the DNA is much more difficult to damage if it is already missing the exact sequence being targeted for "editing", so the targeted cells will die while the mutants divide to take their place. If I thought specific somatic mutations were good drug targets for cancer, I would be more enthusiastic about CRISPR/Cas9 as a less toxic chemotherapy than a gene-editing therapy.