First experiment with CRISPR in a living patient to try to restore his sight

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Genetic editing is one of the technologies that will most amaze us in the next decade, the possibility of reprogramming our genes to improve our health conditions.

The technique known as CRISPR / Cas9 has turned out to be, not only very effective, but also cheap and can be used with the own instruments of a laboratory without much sophistication.

This name, which sounds like potato chips, comes from the acronym of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats.

These were accidentally discovered forming a kind of immune system for some bacteria, which is very difficult especially when you are a single-cell bacterium.

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As it turns out, these pieces of DNA that are the CRISPR, are fragments of viruses that the bacteria would have survived and that it keeps so that it can be recognized if it strikes again. Awesome!

With these data, scientists managed to apply these principles to all types of cells, including human cells, in order to locate specific DNA sequences.

To this they added a protein called Cas9, which can act as genetic "scissors" and voilà, we already have a tool to cut and paste like windows.

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Using this technique a team led by Dr. Eric Pierce of Harvard Medical School, has carried out for the first time a genetic edition inside a patient's body to cure him of his congenital blindness.

The procedure consisted of injecting the microscopic genetic editing tool, with the CRISPR technique, into the eye of a volunteer patient.

According to the experts, it is still early to verify the results, but they seem very promising.

Read original article
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/04/811461486/in-a-1st-scientists-use-revolutionary-gene-editing-tool-to-edit-inside-a-patient?t=1585326522380

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