BioPharma

Infographic: The rise of CRISPR gene editing, and how it works

A timeline of how CRISPR - an inexpensive and fast-working technology - came into being. These infographics also show the patent work and funding behind CRISPR - and how gene editing could impact a wider population.

CRISPR is fast emerging one of the most potent new technologies in genetic engineering. Nature just took a comprehensive at the genesis of CRISPR, as well as its potential and pitfalls. In the process, it’s created a series of infographs

CRISPR, truly just about three years old, allows researchers to potentially change the DNA of any organism – including humans. It’s an inexpensive, fast-working technology that has researchers envisioning new ways to eliminate disease, create hardier plants, wipe out pathogens and more, Nature points out. Here’s a timeline of the work going on surrounding CRISPR:

The breakneck pace of CRISPR development has researchers spinning out publication after publication. The technology is beginning to outstrip other hot fields – like TALEN and iPS work. Institutions are scrambling for strong patent work and funding is increasing exponentially, as there’s a collective understanding of the sheer power offered by the technology:

“This power is so easily accessible by labs — you don’t need a very expensive piece of equipment and people don’t need to get many years of training to do this,” says Stanley Qi, a systems biologist at Stanford University in California. “We should think carefully about how we are going to use that power.”

 

So how does CRISPR work? And how might it impact a population?

But many researchers are deeply worried that altering an entire population, or eliminating it altogether, could have drastic and unknown consequences for an ecosystem: it might mean that other pests emerge, for example, or it could affect predators higher up the food chain. And researchers are also mindful that a guide RNA could mutate over time such that it targets a different part of the genome. This mutation could then race through the population, with unpredictable effects.

“It has to have a fairly high pay-off, because it has a risk of irreversibility — and unintended or hard-to-calculate consequences for other species,” says George Church, a bioengineer at Harvard Medical School in Boston. In April 2014, Church and a team of scientists and policy experts wrote a commentary in Science6 warning researchers about the risks and proposing ways to guard against accidental release of experimental gene drives.

 

 

 

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