Slashdot Mirror
'Biohacker' Who Injected Himself With DIY Herpes Treatment Found Dead (livescience.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader Okian Warrior quotes Live Science:
The CEO of a biomedical startup who sparked controversy when he injected himself with an untested herpes treatment in front of a live audience in February has died, according to an email sent to Live Science. Aaron Traywick, the CEO of Ascendance Biomedical, was found dead at 11:30 a.m. ET on Sunday (April 29) in a spa room in Washington, D.C., according to a statement provided to Live Science by the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) of the District of Columbia. Traywick was 28 years old. According to the website News2Share.com, Traywick was found in a flotation tank. Flotation tanks are soundproof pods filled with body-temperature saltwater that are used to promote "sensory deprivation."
Vice News reports that Traywick had "lost touch" with co-workers at his company more than four weeks ago, adding that "Disagreements over the company's direction and philosophical differences over how to best distribute its creations split the small startup."
MIT Technology Review reports that Traywick, "who had no formal medical training, was also planning to test an experimental lung cancer treatment that supposedly involved the gene-editing tool CRISPR. The therapy was to be offered at a clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, just a few miles over the U.S. border... An employee at the Tijuana clinic, International BioCare Hospital & Wellness Center, confirmed in a phone interview that doctors there were working with Traywick to set up the trial but won't be moving forward with it after his death...
"In December, the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy issued a statement warning patients about unregulated gene therapies, saying such procedures are potentially dangerous and unlikely to provide any benefit."
Vice News reports that Traywick had "lost touch" with co-workers at his company more than four weeks ago, adding that "Disagreements over the company's direction and philosophical differences over how to best distribute its creations split the small startup."
MIT Technology Review reports that Traywick, "who had no formal medical training, was also planning to test an experimental lung cancer treatment that supposedly involved the gene-editing tool CRISPR. The therapy was to be offered at a clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, just a few miles over the U.S. border... An employee at the Tijuana clinic, International BioCare Hospital & Wellness Center, confirmed in a phone interview that doctors there were working with Traywick to set up the trial but won't be moving forward with it after his death...
"In December, the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy issued a statement warning patients about unregulated gene therapies, saying such procedures are potentially dangerous and unlikely to provide any benefit."
If you RTFA, you'll learn that he was found face down. Presumably, he drowned, but we don't know why he rolled over. Unless something interesting shows up in the autopsy, we may never know for sure.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Gene editing is extremely well understood: it makes predictable changes to human DNA. That's its attraction.
- Seth Brundle
There is no evidence that antibacterial soap actually creates antibiotics resistance in the real world. Furthermore, the gene editing is done on the humans, not on the pathogens.
You'd be amazed at how much more cautious people are who experiment on themselves than doctors who experiment on others and don't really have to worry about the consequences.
I'm a research scientist in biotech. The only reason I would try self-CRISPR/Cas9 would be if I had a gun pointed at my head. Here's the deal: biology is hard. Figuring out a target for drug discovery--a single enzyme--is usually based off of years to decades of basic academic research. From there the rule of thumb is 10 years and $1 billion to come up with an actual marketable drug; a great many compounds--hundreds of thousands to millions--will be tried from initial high throughput screening to animal models to clinical trials. Most do nothing and are eliminated early. Some that have efficacy in vitro fail to work in vivo. Some are found to be effective but with unacceptable side effects. Some are even lethal. Testing is exhaustive in part because predicting what compound has what it takes to be an efficacious drug is beyond our current abilities, and will remain such for the foreseeable future.
Only for the most basic things might a CRISPR/Cas9 approach currently be feasible, for instance modifying a single gene encoding a single protein that has an undesirable point mutation, cystic fibrosis for example. Now any kid with a masters degree in a relevant field probably could, given time and resources, modify the gene as desired in cell culture. Delivery of treatment in a safe and efficacious manner in an adult organism is an entirely different manner however and a lone "biohacker" isn't going to be able to compete with a team of well funded experts.