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- Prime editing devised by researchers at the Broad Institute led by David Liu is a significant advance of the original CRISPR gene editing tool discovered in 2012
- CRISPR can cut and edit your DNA to correct defects inside your body’s cells to prevent and heal a range of incurable diseases and has revolutionized biomedicine
- The original CRISPR is fraught with inaccuracies referred to as off target effects
- Prime editing substantially reduces CRISPR’s off target effects and has the potential to correct up to 89% of known disease-causing genetic variations
- CRISPR also has the capacity to edit genes in an embryo in such a way that the change is heritable
- In 2018 Chinese researcher He Jiankui “created” the world’s first CRISPR babies
- This triggered international criticism from scientists and bioethicists
- A principal concern is that CRISPR is easy-to-use, cheap, regularly used in thousands of laboratories throughout the world and there is no internationally agreed and enforceable regulatory framework for its use
For better or worse we all now live in CRISPR’s world
In 2012 the world of biomedicine changed when a revolutionary gene editing technology known as CRISPR-Cas9 (an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) was discovered. The technology harnesses your body’s naturally occurring immune system that bacteria use to fight-off viruses and has the potential to forever change the fundamental nature of humanity. Since its discovery CRISPR has been developing at lightning speed primarily because it is simple and affordable and today is used in thousands of laboratories throughout the world.
In this Commentary
In this Commentary we describe prime editing, which is the latest advance of the CRISPR's tool box, devised bya team of researchers, led by Andrew Anzalone, a Jane Coffin Childs postdoctoral fellow from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and published in the October 2019 edition of Nature. Prime editing is significant because it provides a means to eliminate the unintentional consequences of CRISPR and therefore bring the technique closer for use in clinics. But this is still a long way off.
We also review a case where an ambitious scientist “created” the first CRISPR babies. This immediately triggered international criticism and a call for tighter regulatory control of the technology. Scientists and bioethicists are concerned that CRISPR can easily be used to create heritable DNA changes, which ultimately could lead to ‘designer babies’.
These two accounts of CRISPR might seem “opposites” and not sit well together in a single Commentary. Notwithstanding, what prompted putting them together was John Travis, the News Managing Editor of the well-known scientific journal Science, who soon after CRISPR’s discovery in 2012 said, “For better or worse we all now live in CRISPR’s world”.
CRISPR and your DNA
CRISPR is different to traditional gene therapy, which uses viruses to insert new genes into cells to try and treat diseases and has caused some safety challenges. CRISPR, which avoids the use of viruses, was conceived in 2007 when a yogurt company identified an unexpected defence mechanism that its bacteria used to fight off viruses. Subsequent research made a surprising observation that bacteria could remember viruses. CRISPR has been likened to a pair of microscopic scissors that can cut and edit your DNA to correct defects inside your body’s cells to prevent and heal a range of intractable diseases. The standard picture of DNA is a double helix, which looks similar to a ladder that has been twisted. The steps in this twisted ladder are DNA base pairs. The fundamental building blocks of DNA are the four bases adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). They are commonly known by their respective letters, A, C, G and T. Three billion of these letters form the complete manual for building and maintaining your body, but tiny errors can cause disease. For example, a mutation that turned one specific A into a T results in the most common form of sickle cell disease.
We also review a case where an ambitious scientist “created” the first CRISPR babies. This immediately triggered international criticism and a call for tighter regulatory control of the technology. Scientists and bioethicists are concerned that CRISPR can easily be used to create heritable DNA changes, which ultimately could lead to ‘designer babies’.
These two accounts of CRISPR might seem “opposites” and not sit well together in a single Commentary. Notwithstanding, what prompted putting them together was John Travis, the News Managing Editor of the well-known scientific journal Science, who soon after CRISPR’s discovery in 2012 said, “For better or worse we all now live in CRISPR’s world”.
CRISPR and your DNA
CRISPR is different to traditional gene therapy, which uses viruses to insert new genes into cells to try and treat diseases and has caused some safety challenges. CRISPR, which avoids the use of viruses, was conceived in 2007 when a yogurt company identified an unexpected defence mechanism that its bacteria used to fight off viruses. Subsequent research made a surprising observation that bacteria could remember viruses. CRISPR has been likened to a pair of microscopic scissors that can cut and edit your DNA to correct defects inside your body’s cells to prevent and heal a range of intractable diseases. The standard picture of DNA is a double helix, which looks similar to a ladder that has been twisted. The steps in this twisted ladder are DNA base pairs. The fundamental building blocks of DNA are the four bases adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). They are commonly known by their respective letters, A, C, G and T. Three billion of these letters form the complete manual for building and maintaining your body, but tiny errors can cause disease. For example, a mutation that turned one specific A into a T results in the most common form of sickle cell disease.
The original CRISPR
The original CRISPR tool, which is the first and most popular gene editing system, uses a guide RNA (principally a messenger carrying instructions from your DNA for controlling the synthesis of proteins) to locate a mutated gene plus an enzyme, like Cas9, to cut the double-stranded gene helix and create space for functioning genes to be inserted. However, a concern about CRISPR is that the editing could go awry and cause unintended changes in DNA that could trigger health problems. Findings of a study published in the July 2018 edition of the journal Nature Biotechnology found that such inaccuracies, referred to as off-target effects, were substantially higher than originally reported and some were thought to silence genes that should be active and activate genes that should be silent. These off-target effects, such as random insertions, deletions, translocations, or other base-to-base conversions, pose significant challenges for developing policy associated with the technology.
Subsequently however, the paper was retracted, and an error correction was posted on a scientific website. Contrary to their original findings, the authors of the Nature Biotechnology paper restated that the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing approach, "can precisely edit the genome at the organismal level and may not introduce numerous, unintended, off-target mutations".
Notwithstanding, researchers remained concerned about CRISPR’s off target effects and several devised a technique, referred to as base editing, to reduce these. Base editing is described in three research papers published in 2017: one in the November edition of the journal ‘Protein and Cell’, another in the October edition of ‘Science’ the and a third by researchers from the Broad Institute, in the October edition of the journal ‘Nature’. Base editing takes the original CRISPR-Cas9 and fuses it to proteins that can make four precise DNA changes: it can change the letters C-to-T, T-to-C, A-to-G and G-to-A. The technique genetically transforms base pairs at a target position in the genome of living cells with more than 50% efficiency and virtually no detectable off-target effects. Despite its success, there remained other types of point mutations that scientists wanted to target for diseases.
Subsequently however, the paper was retracted, and an error correction was posted on a scientific website. Contrary to their original findings, the authors of the Nature Biotechnology paper restated that the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing approach, "can precisely edit the genome at the organismal level and may not introduce numerous, unintended, off-target mutations".
Base editing
Notwithstanding, researchers remained concerned about CRISPR’s off target effects and several devised a technique, referred to as base editing, to reduce these. Base editing is described in three research papers published in 2017: one in the November edition of the journal ‘Protein and Cell’, another in the October edition of ‘Science’ the and a third by researchers from the Broad Institute, in the October edition of the journal ‘Nature’. Base editing takes the original CRISPR-Cas9 and fuses it to proteins that can make four precise DNA changes: it can change the letters C-to-T, T-to-C, A-to-G and G-to-A. The technique genetically transforms base pairs at a target position in the genome of living cells with more than 50% efficiency and virtually no detectable off-target effects. Despite its success, there remained other types of point mutations that scientists wanted to target for diseases.
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