'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."

Comments

I hope more people will do this

[ooloorie]

"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."

It's "potentially dangerous" in the same sense as repairing your own car, packing your own parachute, or building your own hang glider is dangerous. Yes, you can hurt or kill yourself, but if you know what you're doing, you can limit the risk to something reasonable.

Furthermore, for human gene therapy, drug companies and the FDA really can't do much to reduce the risk anyway; most of the negative effects can only be observed in living human beings, so either you inject the therapy into a living human being or you don't get a gene therapy.

If people take these risks voluntarily, human gene therapy can make rapid progress and not be subject to million dollar a shot monopoly pricing. Drug companies don't like these kinds of grassroots efforts because they undercut their business.

Re:I hope more people will do this

[Greyfox]

Cars, Parachutes and gliders are a very well known problem space. It's not terribly hard to find someone in those problem spaces who can tell you if what you're doing is going to kill you. Gene editing is not a well-understood field at this point. We're just poking at things and seeing what happens. Even if you find something that looks like it's going to work, you really need to study that process for years to make sure that all the potential consequences are well understood. We're not at that point yet, and I'd honestly be surprised if it was less than another 2 - 5 decades before we're even remotely certain of anything that modifies human DNA for non-terminal diseases. For all we know at this point, this guy died of turbo-herpes and has introduced turbo-herpes into the ecosystem. That's why we need to be careful with this stuff.

Re:I hope more people will do this

[quantaman]

"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."

It's "potentially dangerous" in the same sense as repairing your own car, packing your own parachute, or building your own hang glider is dangerous. Yes, you can hurt or kill yourself, but if you know what you're doing, you can limit the risk to something reasonable.

More like building your own car or parachute. This isn't "non-expert does something that experts do routinely" it's "non-expert attempts something that experts are still trying to figure out how to do safely".

Furthermore, for human gene therapy, drug companies and the FDA really can't do much to reduce the risk anyway; most of the negative effects can only be observed in living human beings, so either you inject the therapy into a living human being or you don't get a gene therapy.

I'm sure researchers have more ways that live trials on humans to start testing the safety and efficacy of these treatments. As for the DIY, medical treatments are notoriously hard to measure outcomes for, I mean there's still people who swear by homeopathic treatments. DIY is not the way to figure out if these treatments work.

Re:I hope more people will do this

[ArmoredDragon]

Cars and parachutes are a poor analogy anyways. This is more like opening up a binary copy of the Linux kernel with a hex editor, and making changes to it with only a very rudimentary knowledge of assembly, and hardly any knowledge of the Linux kernel in general. Screwing up with that means the kernel crashes or something just doesn't work right. Screwing up with CRISPR, assuming something besides nothing at all happens, is going to fail spectacularly...like oh say...cancer formation in multiple major organs simultaneously.

Re:I hope more people will do this

[Victor Liu]

Gene editing is extremely well understood: it makes predictable changes to human DNA. That's its attraction.

Absolutely. However, the consequences of those very predictable edits is not well understood.

Re:I hope more people will do this

[Greyfox]

Right. I don't understand how gene editing works. I do understand how programming works, though. And I understand what happens when some jackass who doesn't understand about programming starts cutting and pasting code around and finds that he's occasionally somewhat successful at getting something to do sort of what he wants it to. We're doing that now with systems more complex than anything humanity has ever built. Given that we can't even change the formulation of soap without accidentally unleashing antibiotic-resistant E-Coli on an unsuspecting world, we really should approach this shit with a little bit of humility and caution.

Re:I hope more people will do this

[Victor Liu]

Absolutely. However, the consequences of those very predictable edits is not well understood.

That's saying that the consequences of editing a text file with emacs are not well understood; it's a meaningless statement, since the consequences depend on the edit.

There are many edits with predictable consequences. There are many edits with unpredictable consequences. But the range of consequences is pretty straightforward: most of the time, nothing happens, and rarely the person either gets sick or gets better.

I think the better analogy is it is like using emacs to edit a large binary executable (something I've actually done before in trying to crack licensed programs). One would hope that, through a debugger, one has a good idea of what the edit is supposed to do in order to exact the changes expected. Even when I was pretty sure I understood what changes I needed to make, I was still not eliminating the license checks, and causing random crashes. I don't claim to be an expert at doing this. However, our biological understanding (the debugger) is currently similarly lacking, if not more so. We know that editing DNA sequences modifies the transcribed proteins, and that there are also epigenetic factors that are affected (which was only established relatively recently), among other things (possibly yet to be discovered). I personally believe it is presumptuous and premature to declare that consequences of edits are predictable, since there could be subtle long-term decades-later effects of edits, or perhaps consequences for progeny of those subject to gene editing.

There are some implausible scenarios under which gene editing might pose a risk to other humans, but regulations are not going to stop those anyway, so you might as well not bother making those illegal.

What should be, and what is, as you point out, are two different things. I would rather be overly cautious in the case.

Re:Visionnary retards

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes, but I question just how visionary some of these biohacker sorts are. To be a visionary, you need a goal and a plan. Saying that you want to use the next big thing to cure a disease is simple; actually following trough is the hard part. These people just hear the Crispr hype and think it is some cure all for every disease without any understanding of what they're talking about. Having good fundamentals in the biological sciences is absolutely essential, and I question how much actual knowledge these sorts have.

Don't misunderstand, there's nothing wrong with the idea of DIY Bio for people who have been screwed by the system as it stands (and believe me, it happens). Biotechnology should not be the property of just of ivory towers and corporate interests, and putting that into the hands of the people is a laudable goal. Still, if you don't know what you're doing, you probably shouldn't be doing it. I mean, you wouldn't try making fireworks without a basic understanding of chemistry and physics, would you? The Crispr gene editing system has a lot of potential over older gene editing mechanisms, sure, but all these people who think gene editing is some cure all just waiting to happen don't have a clue.

Re:No evidence it was done by the "cure"

[mysidia]

I doubt this is the first death in a sensory deprivation chamber....

Police are still investigating the cause of his death.

Until more information is available... Occam's razor say, this the simplest
explanation: This was probably just another unfortunate fatal accident in a sensory
deprivation chamber...

NO it's not the first death in such a chamber.
These chambers can be quite dangerous.... others have died in them by cause of hyperthermia,
or drugs/alcohol toxicity. Drowning or electrocution are major risks.

This could also have been a suicide. From this person's documented past behavior.... it is possible the fellow was not sane and had some other issues; Most people aren't comfortable "Injecting themselves" with anything ---- he may have later injected himself with more dangerous stuff, such as heroine, LSD or other hallucinogenics shortly before going into this chamber.