Edited and polyselected babies: what’s going on?

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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China vs USA: who leads the CRISPR race?

China vs US

The first human CRISPR trial approved in the United States is finally recruiting the first patient. In the meantime trials have grown to a dozen in China, considering those revealed by the Wall Street Journal inquiry besides the NIH database (check also this npr article for further details). Over 80 Chinese patients are already receiving a CRISPR-based treatment, while US researchers cautiously plan to test the safety of their experimental therapy on a single subject, and, if everything goes right, two more patients will be treated a month later. Is the West losing its genome-editing edge to Beijing? Continue reading