Tag Archives: germline editing

Edited and polyselected babies: what’s going on?

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An investigation by The Wall Street Journal has looked into Silicon Valley companies pushing the most controversial frontiers of assisted reproduction. It combines two rather different themes. Number one: the production of numerous embryos from which to choose based on a polygenic score that includes predispositions to hundreds of diseases and even a handful of desirable non-medical traits. Number two: gene-editing of embryos (also known as heritable or germline editing), which we’ve discussed many times since the case of the CRISPR babies in China and which now seems to be gaining new ground (the most talked-about company in this field is called Preventive).

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He’s version

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He 5 core principles

Don’t miss the “Draft Ethical Principles for Therapeutic Assisted Reproductive Technologies” just published by He Jiankui et al. in The CRISPR Journal. It seems the Lulu and Nana’s experiment is at odds even with their own guidelines. We are eager to hear more from He’s voice, his talk in Hong Kong is scheduled on Wednesday, 28 November 2018 (Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing-live broadcast)

Charting CRISPR ethical landscape

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More than 60 germline ethics statements have been released by the international community so far (Italy is not included in the figure). Carolyn Brokowski, from the Yale School of Medicine, read and analyzed them all in The CRISPR Journal. A glance at her pie chart reveals a snapshot of ​the experts’ opinions on the moral permissibility of heritable genome editing. Continue reading →

China did it once again

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huang

Junjiu Huang is back. Two years later, Protein & Cell publishes another study by the team which first edited human embryos in 2015 sparking uproar. They targeted the gene responsible for beta thalassemia, once again. This time, however, in place of using embryos discarded by fertilization clinics, they resorted to cloning. Furthermore, Huang and colleagues employed a CRISPR variant called base editor changing a single DNA letter without even cutting the double helix. The news is circulating among experts but has not yet attracted the media spotlight. Stem cell specialist Alessandro Bertero has brought it to the attention of CRISPeR Frenzy. According to the researcher involved in the British experiment just published in Nature, the latest paper from China is far from perfect but it’s quite interesting anyway (see his technical comment below). Continue reading →

Editing embryos, the British way

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embrioni UK.docxThey are the first human embryos edited in Europe and reported in scientific literature. The key difference with experiments already carried out in China and US is that the research published by Nature last week doesn’t have embryonic gene therapy in view. The London Francis Crick’s Institute team, in fact, was not interested in correcting disease-causing mutations but in increasing knowledge on human embryonic development. We asked one of the authors, Alessandro Bertero, to explain goals and results. The Italian researcher was pursuing his Ph.D. at Cambridge when he helped to refine the technique used by Kathy Niakan and colleagues to edit the genome of embryos. He answered our questions via Skype from America, where he continues working on embryonic stem cells as a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University Continue reading →

Edited embryos. Why to say yes or no

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The exploit announced last week by Nature marks an advancement in CRISPR performance in human embryos big enough to say that yes, germ line editing will probably become a viable option sooner or later. It means that some genetic diseases (at least those caused by a single mutation) can be corrected not only in the treated individuals but also in their offspring. The idea of genetic diseases disappearing from the face of Earth is bound to remain a dream, as Eric Lander explained at the 2015 Washington Summit on Human Gene Editing. In short, with rare Mendelian diseases, the vast majority of situations can currently be addressed by in vitro fertilization and preimplantation genetic diagnosis, while complex diseases are, well, too complex to handle. Anyway, when you come to efficiency and accuracy, results achieved by Shoukhrat Mitalipov and colleagues are exciting: CRISPR science walks on robust and fast legs. As for the bioethics of the experiment, we should try not to get stuck with overused labels. Continue reading →