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Editing DNA For Fame and Fortune

Posted by Soulskill on from the careful-what-you-optimize-for dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The world of genome editing is booming, with several startups racing to develop new tools and therapies out of the DNA-hacking insights of several hotshot scientists. Venture capitalists are pouring big money into this so-called 'CRISPR craze,' which has attracted over $600 million in funding since the beginning of 2013. But major questions loom over who is the rightful owner of this technology, and the leading parties are battling for control of the key patents. Will this new crop of genome-editing companies survive long enough to fulfill their promise of treating genetic disorders? As the patent feud wages on, lives and fortunes hang in the balance.

43 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. CRISPR second generation medicine by Dukenukemx · · Score: 1

    Today it'll fix genetic disorders. Tomorrow it'll allow us to change our attributes.

    1. Re:CRISPR second generation medicine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Like cup size. Invest in bra manufacturers!

    2. Re:CRISPR second generation medicine by Adriax · · Score: 2

      Charisma is just one SPECIAL you can raise with this. I'd personally be more interested in Luck.

      I wonder how many caps it'll cost per treatment?

      --
      I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
    3. Re:CRISPR second generation medicine by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 1

      D&D Doctor: "Some people are doing +STR or +CHA or +CON, but most males are taking +PNS."

      --
      (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
  2. I have invented things that will change the world by Rinikusu · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    For instance, here's the 4 assed monkey.

    --
    If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
  3. Time to recompile humanity by sinij · · Score: 1

    It is time to recompile humanity. Too many bugs in the old stable release. First we can patch out bugs, but we will also be able to optimize performance and add new features. This way we won't have to be scared of AI out of fear that it could rewrite itself. We would be able to do that as well.

    1. Re:Time to recompile humanity by sinij · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Feature requests:

      1. Perfect recall

      2. Integrated ALU capable of complex math

      3. Direct userland control over driver behavior (e.g. uninstall gluttony)

      4. More wetware redundancies to increase uptime

      5. Run-time patching and garbage collection to reduce the need for nightly downtime

    2. Re:Time to recompile humanity by PPH · · Score: 1

      6. An e-mail client

      --
      Have gnu, will travel.
    3. Re:Time to recompile humanity by DigiShaman · · Score: 1

      Most likely, AI would be the one recompiling our DNA for us. It may..say...unleash a virus to no wipe out humanity, but rather change it.

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    4. Re:Time to recompile humanity by oh_my_080980980 · · Score: 1

      You realize those bugs are mutations that allowed "us" to happen. Without them organisms would not have evolved beyond single celled organisms.

    5. Re:Time to recompile humanity by holmstar · · Score: 1

      Yeah, but we can do better than random modifications if we have a solid understanding of ourselves. Huge challenge though, as our biology is a huge example of spaghetti code. Right now, changing one gene can have a complex cascade of unintended consequences. Some level of interdependency is probably necessary, but it's likely that a lot of it isn't, it just ended up that way randomly. It will really be the golden age of DNA modification if we figure out enough that we can start unraveling those interdependencies and clean up our genetics.

    6. Re:Time to recompile humanity by holmstar · · Score: 1

      No not like "non-coding DNA is junk". You can have a fully functional example of spaghetti code where every bit of it is doing something vital to the code being functional, but doing it in a way that is much more complicated than necessary.

    7. Re:Time to recompile humanity by rogoshen1 · · Score: 1

      Where are my mod points? And why isn't there an option for "-5 Stupidly Naive and Autistic"?

      Look at the problems space programs have had world over. Mission scrubbing bugs revolving around things as trivial as converting between metric and imperial. Mistakes made by teams comprised of literally some of the smartest people on the entire planet.

      And you're naive enough to think we'd be able to do better than millions of years of trial and error evolution?

      No thank you.

    8. Re:Time to recompile humanity by pesho · · Score: 1

      Yeah, but we can do better than random modifications if we have a solid understanding of ourselves.

      Can you do better? May be you could in the simplest of cases, where we know that the gene variant in another organism works better than the variant we have. Even in such cases you will need to brace yourself for the unexpected consequences. The number of nonlinear interactions between different genes, and between genes and the environment makes it very hard to predict outcomes. There is a virtue in having a population with buggy, unstable and diverse genomes. If the environment changes, and it alwys does, the population as a whole has a better chance of surviving the changes, compared to a population with stable and uniform genomes.

      Having said that here is the number one on my list for bettering the human genome:DNA Photolyase, an enzyme that directly repairs the most common type of DNA damage caused by UV light. For reasons that are poorly understood most mammals, including humans lack this enzyme. The health benefit is obvious - a photolyase will reduce the incidence of skin cancer.

    9. Re:Time to recompile humanity by holmstar · · Score: 1

      Me? Absolutely not. I'm a software engineer, not a biochemist. That doesn't mean that nobody can. We've mapped the genome, now the job is figuring out what everything does, including all of the interactions. Once we know that (which is a truly massive task that has only just begun), we can start looking at what we can change to make things work better. It might require changing many things at once in order to separate, for example, two biological pathways that are currently connected, where correcting an issue in one creates an issue in the other. And the result might be people that are no longer genetically compatible with unmodified humans. I'll let someone else tackle the sociological effects of that, but it's almost certainly possible to make those sort of changes once we understand our biology well enough.

    10. Re:Time to recompile humanity by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      7. WiFi

      8. More space than a Nomad

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    11. Re:Time to recompile humanity by the+gnat · · Score: 1

      Yea just like non-coding DNA is junk. Does every generation have to make the same hubristic errors?

      You're grossly overstating the case here. The fact that non-coding DNA contains essential regulatory information has been known for many decades, long before the modern age of genomics. The label "junk" was applied because nobody knew what most of that DNA did, and it obviously has very low information content compared to genes. But this pejorative never stopped people from studying it or trying to figure out what role it played - of course it imposes a significant metabolic cost on the organism, so why keep it around? We just haven't had mature tools to study it until relatively recently. Despite some sensationalism to the contrary, it's still far from resolved whether and how much it is functional; the best-supported hypothesis that I'm aware of is that it's structurally important and facilitates the 3D organization of the genome in cells in such a way that enhances regulatory control. We certainly don't have any clue how to derive therapeutic applications from our knowledge, unlike coding DNA (i.e. translated into proteins that most drugs target).

      The claim that "mainstream biologists assumed that noncoding DNA was junk, and therefore asked the wrong questions" is simplistic nonsense at best, and creationist propaganda at worst. Scientific investigation - especially biology - proceeds on the basis of incomplete evidence all the time, because we have no choice (among other lacunae, we still don't understand what half of all human genes actually do). And unexpected new discoveries or inventions shake up molecular biology on a fairly regular basis - 10-15 years ago, RNA interference was thought to be equally revolutionary. So we always hope for surprises (all research faculty at major universities fantasize about making discoveries like Crispr/Cas), but we have to concentrate on areas of study that we feel are most likely to yield actual results.

    12. Re:Time to recompile humanity by ThatsNotPudding · · Score: 1

      sudo apt-get uninstall greed
      sudo apt-get uninstall religion

    13. Re:Time to recompile humanity by holmstar · · Score: 2

      It is confidently asserting that because you don't understand nature's ways that you are observing a suboptimal solution.

      Ha! What in the world suggests to you that we're an optimal solution? Evolution only makes an organism fit enough to reproduce and rear the next generation. Things that cause problems rarely, or create health in old age are poorly selected for. If we're optimized for anything, it would be as tribal hunter-gatherers, not modern civilization. Science is not magic. I am confident that we can do better, if we choose to do so.

    14. Re:Time to recompile humanity by currently_awake · · Score: 1

      There are 2 ways to handle this: 1-map out everything and figure out what/how everything works, so there are no unexpected results. 2-try stuff out and see what happens. Obviously plan 2 requires a corporation and a 3rd world military dictatorship, as they don't have moral values and human rights laws to block this.

    15. Re:Time to recompile humanity by pesho · · Score: 1

      So you'd then have two repair mechanisms.

      And by "two" you mean "three". The two mechanisms dealing with this type of damage in human cells are Nucleotide Excision Repair and Trans-Lesion Synthesis. There are multiple published works showing that the resistance of human cells to UV radiation increases when they are made to express photolyase. Doesn't matter if one mechanism is better than the other as long as having two (or three) does a better job than one.

    16. Re:Time to recompile humanity by pesho · · Score: 1

      How exactly is "1-map out everything and figure out what/how everything works, so there are no unexpected results." different from "2-try stuff out and see what happens."? Is far as I know the way we "figure how something works" is to "try stuff out and see what happens". We do this with lab animals and then try as best as we can to show that the animal model is a good approximation to the human. If this is the case we can assume that we whatever "stuff" we tried on the animal will work the same way in humans without doing human experimentation. You can also "experiment" on humans without being unethical. That's why we study human disease. In this case the some random "stuff" has been already broken by nature and we can see the consequences. What is left to us is to figure out what the "stuff" is.

    17. Re:Time to recompile humanity by sootman · · Score: 1

      I'd be happy with upgraded logic in 51% of the population. :D

      (Yes, I'm going to hell for that one.)

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      Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
    18. Re:Time to recompile humanity by holmstar · · Score: 1

      Then I guess I'm just more optimistic about what we can learn and do than you are. Nature is far from perfect.

    19. Re:Time to recompile humanity by St.Creed · · Score: 1

      However, nature was optimizing for survival until somewhere around the age of 16. Any time after that was just an unintentional, beneficial side effect. I do agree with the GP that we can probably enhance ourselves quite a bit to optimize for survival to, say, 200 years of age.

      It probably wouldn't even take all that much. What about a second heart? Take up cancer resistance genes that give more heart issues, but offset that with a smaller backup heart tucked away somewhere. Most americans have got plenty of space for a full RAID-5 set of them :)

      Optimize the lay-out of our spine. It sucks. We can develop much stronger, lighter spines nowadays, without touching the original purpose.

      Optimize our air intake channels: our lungs were developed when the air intake was at the front instead of the top, and stuff that came in was pulled out by gravity eventually.

      Remove killer mutations before birth. A personal one - I've several acquaintances with dead babies due to genetic defects. Horrible, painful, lingering deaths in both cases. Both rare enough that the standard screening didn't get it. Once we can cure the carriers this won't happen as much as it does now.

      Etcetera.

      Nature doesn't optimize. The first working solution is the one that has the advantage and thus gets adopted. We can do better with a little thought and foresight, once we understand genetics - but we're not so near that point as some people like to believe, I fear.

      --
      Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
  4. If it ever takes off, no stopping it by sideslash · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If genetic modifications ever emerge as the medical miracle they're supposed to, there will be no stopping the use of the technology. All you need is for a country to refuse to enforce or recognize the patents, and presto -- the world's foremost medical tourism destination. I sort of despise the idea of patenting features of nature, so perhaps a bit of schadenfreude there.

    I have no doubt the information will be spread, too. If Snowden can be widely hailed as a hero for leaking the NSA's rampant cybercrime, just imagine the pats on the back for the guy who leaks the key to cancer. (Yeah, yeah, along with threats of jail time, so he'll have to light out for Cambodia or whatever.)

    1. Re:If it ever takes off, no stopping it by fustakrakich · · Score: 1

      All you need is for a country to refuse to enforce or recognize the patents

      I certainly wish for a few of those, but they WILL be invaded, even nuked, if that's what it takes. The mafia state will not be denied.

      --
      “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
    2. Re:If it ever takes off, no stopping it by ColdWetDog · · Score: 2

      It will likely be China. You won't get a molecule or drug out of these kinds of 'treatments' - you'll get a protocol that involves specialized handling and specific, tailor made molecules. So you likely won't see patent busting big chemical factories like you now see in India, you need a back room (or more likely an entire building) of highly developed infrastructure, trained people and some significant time to get these techniques to work. It won't be quite as easy as TFA seems to think it is*.

      China fits the bill pretty well.

      * While you very well may get kitchen biochemists manipulating CRISPER-CAS9, the jump from mucking about the DNA code to a useful therapeutic is very, very wide. Which is why all of these startups are running with multi million dollar VC infusions.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    3. Re:If it ever takes off, no stopping it by plover · · Score: 1

      I still don't understand how they can control it well enough. It seems like 99.9% of the mods they might try to make would result in a cancerous tumor. And if that's the case, a back alley in Chiba City wouldn't seem so attractive after all.

      --
      John
    4. Re:If it ever takes off, no stopping it by JoeMerchant · · Score: 1

      On the spread of genetic modification:

      Whether the agent is engineered by Skynet, Osama II, or the NSA, somebody (anybody) could create a virus that sweeps the world like an annoying, seemingly harmless, flu bug. One that makes the children of every couple who were ever infected have blue eyes, or fingernails that glow in the dark after they eat peanuts, or other things....

    5. Re:If it ever takes off, no stopping it by the+gnat · · Score: 1

      I sort of despise the idea of patenting features of nature

      I'm not sure I would call the therapeutic applications of Crispr/Cas a "feature of nature". Any actual therapy is going to consist of, at a minimum, a combination of synthetic RNA and orthologously expressed Cas9 (probably heavily engineered). This isn't something that exists naturally in humans. I'm generally pretty conservative about what I would consider patentable (software, or "all drugs targeting this protein", are not included), and, frankly, I think it would be better for everyone if the patents around Crispr/Cas were limited to specific treatments rather than the general concept. But regardless, any useful therapies are going to involve a great deal of engineering and trial-and-error - and clinical testing, which is going to be the most expensive part. What's the incentive to spend money on this if China ends up copying it? Don't say "for the good of humanity" - if that were the primary goal, money would be far better spent curing various endemic infectious diseases.

    6. Re:If it ever takes off, no stopping it by currently_awake · · Score: 1

      In many parts of the world, a drug or virus you inject to ensure you only have male children would be worth several years salary. Also a virus that causes infertility, but only against a specific racial group, would be a very desirable biological weapon.

    7. Re:If it ever takes off, no stopping it by JoeMerchant · · Score: 1

      It doesn't even have to target humans.... how about a mutation that makes Hitchcock's Birds a reality, on demand when they smell a certain chemical that is odorless to humans....

  5. Re:Khaaaaaan! by sinij · · Score: 1

    I, for one, would like to sign up to be our new genetically-engineered overlord.

  6. Re:Can they cure by DigiShaman · · Score: 1

    There's no genetic cure for ignorance; a mental state that can be changed if we so choose of our own volition.

    --
    Life is not for the lazy.
  7. Will this new crop of genome-editing companies sur by koan · · Score: 1

    Do we want them to survive?

    --
    "If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
  8. Re:Khaaaaaan! by aurizon · · Score: 1

    I hereby collect you as my 10,000th genetic slave - the real Genetic Overlord...

  9. Patent What? by g0bshiTe · · Score: 2

    What's to patent? DNA is clearly prior art and in public domain.

    --
    I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
    1. Re:Patent What? by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 1

      Sliding DNA into dynamic storage locations your body uses to flag viruses for destruction, for other uses like recognizing and killing cancer, or performing DNA surgery, might be.

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      (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
    2. Re:Patent What? by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 1

      Here's a recent Radiolab on CRISPR

      --
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  10. PUT THE OLD COMMENT LINKS BACK by sootman · · Score: 2

    That is all.

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  11. why bother? by AndyKron · · Score: 1

    why bother inventing something if you can look forward to a life-long court battle?

  12. Re: Khaaaaaan! by GrantRobertson · · Score: 1

    I knew somebody would beat me to it.

    Just like the real meaning to the Cylon Prayer, "All this has happened before and will happen again." Certain things are inevitable. There are countries and scientists who will have no problem with the the thousands of "failed experiments" necessary to perfect these techniques. The only question is whether we will die in eugenics wars, or at the hands of super-AI, or from runaway global warming.