People would soon be able to make designer babies and cure diseases with gene editing

Everyone has genetic traits they wish they hadn’t inherited, such as diseases and disabilities.


Others are matters of preference, like hair colour or height. But at some point, we’ve all looked in a mirror and wished we could shut off a gene or two.

 In a lab in a Toronto hospital, scientists are working on doing just that; it is called gene editing. Yes, like editing a script, human genes are now being edited.

Researchers at the Hospital for Sick Children used a new gene editing tool called CRISPR-Cas9 to edit the embryonic cells of mice and give them the same mutation as Gavriel Rosenfeld, a teenager from the U.K. with a rare form of muscular dystrophy.

Soon the researchers plan to inject the mice with a virus that contains the CRISPR-Cas9 guide, which will find and remove the duplicated portion of the gene.

If everything goes according to plan, lead investigator Ronald Cohn hopes to test the treatment on Rosenfeld in two to four years. And if that works, everything changes. On the plus side, incurable diseases could be better treated and maybe even reversed. But critics say the technology could also lead to designer babies and other abuses.

For Cohn, he imagines a future where health-care professionals could use CRISPR (which stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) to cure inherited diseases with custom treatments.

“I have another 20 years before I retire,” he said. “I want to write prescriptions for this one day.”

The technology is only a few years old, but advances are happening fast and investors and major corporations are paying attention. CRISPR startups and research projects have already attracted more than US$1 billion in investment from venture capitalists, major pharmaceutical companies and even agricultural giant E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Co. (DuPont).

Often compared to the find-and-replace function in a word processor, CRISPR makes gene editing cheap and precise. The technology has the potential to solve a wide range of humanity’s toughest problems, from cancer to peanut allergies.

Researchers have yet to test CRISPR on a human subject, with a cancer-related clinical trial funded by tech billionaire Sean Parker expected to be the first.

In the U.S., unscrupulous entrepreneurs have taken advantage of people’s unwillingness to wait for science to catch up to expectations by opening clinics offering expensive, dubious treatments because the commercial potential for gene editing is huge.

Source: Financial Post