By Liquan Cai,a,∗ Alfred L. Fisher,b,c Haochu Huang,d and Zijian Xiea
Published online 2016 Aug 30.
Source: NCBI, NLM, NIH
Shidonna Raven Garden and Cook. All Rights Reserved. Copyright.
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Photo Source: Unsplash, Andriyko Podilnuk
Many within the medical community and outside are excited about CRISPR and its possibilities others are horrified. We do not have to look far to see an example of disease mongering. The world paused as COVID 19 swept the world. People are still grappling with the disease as new variants come out and people who were once vaccine hesitant are now facing COVID 19 mandates and apartheid.
While the world deals with what they hope is the aftermath of COVID 19, WHO (World Health Organization) is still seeking answers from Wuhan China where one theory suggests the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where COVID 19 is first believed to have broken out, could easily be responsible for the creation and release of the COVID 19 disease. Countries are still questioning how China preparations against the disease seem to be so advanced as the world was still trying to understand what and where the disease came from. Which raises the question how could the science and medical industry use CRISPR, as it has used other methods of disease creation in the past to place profit over people.
CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) technology has emerged as a powerful technology for genome editing and is now widely used in basic biomedical research to explore gene function. More recently, this technology has been increasingly applied to the study or treatment of human diseases, including Barth syndrome effects on the heart, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, hemophilia, β-Thalassemia, and cystic fibrosis. CRISPR/Cas9 (CRISPR-associated protein 9) genome editing has been used to correct disease-causing DNA mutations ranging from a single base pair to large deletions in model systems ranging from cells in vitro to animals in vivo. In addition to genetic diseases, CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing has also been applied in immunology-focused applications such as the targeting of C-C chemokine receptor type 5, the programmed death 1 gene, or the creation of chimeric antigen receptors in T cells for purposes such as the treatment of the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) or promoting anti-tumor immunotherapy.
Furthermore, this technology has been applied to the genetic manipulation of domesticated animals with the goal of producing biologic medical materials, including molecules, cells or organs, on a large scale. Finally, CRISPR/Cas9 has been teamed with induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells to perform multiple tissue engineering tasks including the creation of disease models or the preparation of donor-specific tissues for transplantation. This review will explore the ways in which the use of CRISPR/Cas9 is opening new doors to the treatment of human diseases.
What could be the health impacts of CRISPR and gene editing? Should one do gene editing? How does your religious beliefs impact your thoughts on CRISPR and gene editing?
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