Chronicles from the London editing summit

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CRISPR patient Victoria Gray talking at the summit (credit The Royal Society)

The third – and perhaps final – act of the Human Genome Editing Initiative ended last week. The first summit (Washington 2015) was held amid enthusiasm for the invention of CRISPR, with the aim of fostering a constructive dialogue between science and society. The second edition (Hong Kong 2018) was dominated by the birth in China of the first edited human beings. The main points in the agenda of geneticists and bioethicists meeting a few days ago (London 2023) was to overcome the shock and focus on the next challenges: broadening the range of treatable diseases, reducing the costs of therapies, simplifying them so they can be administered anywhere in the world, and reach as many sick people as possible.

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CRISPR-enabled carbon capture. What’s up?

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Credit CSRWire

The Innovative Genomics Institute runs a program aiming to “supercharge plants and soils to remove carbon from the atmosphere” with the help of CRISPR and funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Iniziative. I asked Andy Murdock, communications director at IGI, three questions to update the picture. Please see his answers below.

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BananApocalypse – How concerned should we be?

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Albert Eckhout: Still-life of citrus fruit and bananas

The alarm about the impending extinction of bananas has been raised over and over in the media over the past decade. How worried do we need to be? And what are plant geneticists doing to ensure long life for this fruit loved by consumers around the world and celebrated by so many artists?

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Xenografts – here’s where we stand

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Surgeon Jayme Locke and immunologist Megan Sykes

David Bennett, the first patient transplanted with a genetically edited pig heart, died on March 8 last year, two months after the surgery, presumably from a latent pig virus (a problem that does not seem hard to solve with more stringent protocols and screening, as Linda Scobie explained to me a few months ago). Since then, experimental transplants have continued in brain-dead patients who had donated their bodies to research. After xenokidneys with a single genetic modification transplanted in late 2021, in the summer of 2022 it was the turn of ten edits xenohearts. The state of the art now is that the potential of the approach still appears high, as does the morale of specialists.

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Just ignore He Jiankui, don’t feed his ego

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(Illustration by Mike McQuade, source Nature)

The Chinese scientist who edited the CRISPR babies was released from prison last spring. He tweets lightheartedly announcing that he has opened a new lab in Beijing. He claims to be dedicated to rare diseases. He is looking for funding that hopefully no one wants to give him. In the rogue experiment that made him famous, he violated so many ethical principles that the only thing one can hope for is that he changes jobs. Is it appropriate for influential newspapers and prestigious institutions to give him a limelight for this attempt to come back on the scene?

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Drought research – persist to resist

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Beating the heat is one of the goals most vigorously pursued by plant geneticists. A solution is not yet in sight, but after so many years of research, it is clear that there are several avenues worth exploring. The three most important things are testing, testing, testing.
The first consideration is that plants can adopt different strategies to survive when water is scarce. You can distinguish between drought resistance and water use efficiency, or go subtle by talking about drought avoidance, drought escape, and drought tolerance.
Another basic premise is that drought can vary in intensity and duration, so that a plant capable of tolerating moderate stress may still succumb under more extreme conditions. Further complicating matters is the fact that, to be adopted by farmers, future crops will have to prove not only more resilient but also as productive as the varieties they are intended to replace. Two strategies are being pursued at the University of Milan with the help of CRISPR.

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A decade of CRISPR is only the beginning

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CRISPR past, present, and future according to the review by Jennifer Doudna and Joy Y. Wang just published in Science. This is the original caption: “The past decade of CRISPR technology has focused on building the platforms for generating gene knockouts, creating knockout mice and other animal models, genetic screening, and multiplexed editing. CRISPR’s applications in medicine and agriculture are already beginning and will serve as the focus for the next decade as society’s demands drive further innovation in CRISPR technology.”

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CRISPR aims straight for the heart

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Photo credit Singularity Hub

The latest challenge is protecting damaged tissue immediately after a heart attack with the help of base editing (see the paper published in Science by Eric Olson’s group at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center). But there are hundreds of devastating diseases that affect the heart or other muscles and are caused by mutations that could be fixed by CRISPR-based tools (see this paper in Science Trsnslational Medicine for example). From Duchenne dystrophy to cardiomyopathies, some preliminary results are very encouraging.
Learn more reading the article on the Science paper published by El Pais and watching this video with Olson explaining his studies, especially on Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

Domesticaton in the CRISPR era

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The world’s food supply depends on about 150 plant species, but this number could increase, even considerably. In fact, 250 species are considered to be fully domesticated, while 7,000 are semi-domesticated and 50,000 are edible. In the genomic era domestication may not require centuries and millennia, as was the case in the early days of agriculture. The process could happen at an accelerated pace, within a few years, taking advantage of modern knowledge about useful traits and new tecnologies such as gene editing. 

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