Slashdot Mirror
A Serious New Hurdle For CRISPR: Edited Cells Might Cause Cancer, Find Two Studies (statnews.com)
Editing cell genomes with CRISPR-Cas9 might increase the risk of developing cancer, two studies published Monday warn. From a report: Editing cells' genomes with CRISPR-Cas9 might increase the risk that the altered cells, intended to treat disease, will trigger cancer, two studies published on Monday warn -- a potential game-changer for the companies developing CRISPR-based therapies. In the studies, published in Nature Medicine, scientists found that cells whose genomes are successfully edited by CRISPR-Cas9 have the potential to seed tumors inside a patient. That could make some CRISPR'd cells ticking time bombs, according to researchers from Sweden's Karolinska Institute and, separately, Novartis. CRISPR has already dodged two potentially fatal bullets -- a 2017 claim that it causes sky-high numbers of off-target effects was retracted in March, and a report of human immunity to Cas9 was largely shrugged off as solvable. But experts are taking the cancer-risk finding seriously.
We possess utterly complete, perfect knowledge regarding all possible aspects of DNA. Otherwise we wouldn't be doing this, right?
#DeleteChrome
Otherwise, we are going to have designer babies, cosmetic gene editing, and super-brain edits before anyone lifts a finger to cure cancer or fix Parkinson's etc.. Oh and not to mention designer viruses. Combo AIDS + Smallbox + Ebola that only kills black/white/asian people anyone?
If CRISPR does cause cancer, researchers might be able to use that to find causes and treatments.
It's not the solution to everything?
I for one am shocked that gene editing can lead to a disease caused by altered genes.
I thought one of the things they were looking at was using it as a solution to cancer cells. Would it be approved to use if it could cure an 'incurable' form of cancer, only to risk causing another cancer? Could it be used to cure the cancer that itself caused?
Maybe not as a designer baby maker, but CRISPR is a lot more than that, being a potential cure for a huge number of genetic diseases that are devastating to those that have them.
I think that the scientists are unworthy of grants.
So because you don't like the results, you want to take away their grants? Are you kidding me? That's not how science works.
In any case, like you, I also hope that the results are wrong, but even if I hate the results, I just can't wish them away (assuming their results are correct, I have no idea if they are, or not).
And on a positive note we can engineer a better Slashdot editor.
Cancer is basically cells that went rogue. You telling me that slicing and dicing DNA (sometimes accidentally in non-target locations) can sometimes cause a cell to not do what it was suppose to? CRISPR is more targetted than say getting hit with a blast of radiation which causes random mutations but you are still changing the programming of a highly complex instruction set written in obfuscated code that we barely understand.
Yes, let's hope for cancer! Hooray! /sarcasm
I really don't know much about CRISPR, but I know at least one couple that was hoping for it to control the sex of their child. That couple already has a child with (pretty serious) autism and according to the dad at least, he was hoping that having a baby girl would cut the chances of having a second autistic child by a huge margin. Unfortuately, this new study doesn't sound like good news for them.
In other utterly obvious news, water is wet.
Why would it be a surprise that 3.2 billion years of evolution has produced a system you can't just twiddle with? How can you understand a system which has iterated so long and so profoundly?
Scientists found that cells whose genomes are successfully edited by CRISPR-Cas9 have the potential to seed tumors inside a patient.
Regular cells, that haven't been edited by CRISPR, have the potential to seed tumors inside a patient -- that's how people usually get cancer.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
This is an obvious and expected issue. Only the particulars are new science. Seems to be solid work, and gives us something else to "tune" in order to make gene editing a reality.
It might not.
According to the letter I got in the mail, I *might* have won Publisher's Clearinghouse...
Thanks for another non-story.
It's not like CRISPR would be on the market for that in the near future anyway.
BLOCKCHAIN!
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
It would seem that those in the fledgling field of genetic engineering are making the same mistakes that those in the then fledgling AI field made in the 60s, to wit: 1. Problems that seemed to be difficult are spectacularly solved. 2. Extravagant forecasts are made on the basis of those successes. 3. The next batch of problems are tackled, and they prove to be much more difficult than the previous batch. 4. The discipline becomes a scientific laughing stock. AI has yet to leave stage 4 completely behind. We'll see if genetic engineering learns from that experience.
Thatâ(TM)s what you get for interfering with something designed and created to perfection by God.
If your deity is a perfect designer, He wouldn't allow cancer and other diseases to get by the immune system in the first place. Therefore, God must develop for Microsoft.
I'm not sure that gene editing immediately leads to "designer" babies, except in the most superficial way. Sure, you can change things like hair, eye, or skin color, but most parents are going to be interested in those things; they'll be more interested in editing out genetic diseases like Huntington's. It's possible that families undergoing IVF with one or more donated gametes may wish to have the child resemble the non-contributor parents.
The really controversial eugenic manipulations are ones that involve things that we don't know how to conjure up with genetic manipulation: intelligence and character.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Wow, you mean mucking about in our DNA with an editor when we don't really know how everything works might give us a fatal disease? Shocking, I tell you, shocking!
I mean, I would really love if they could fix my congenital anosmia. Not being able to smell like everyone else sucks..
They'll never allow it if there is a good chance of cancer though. Smell isn't that important..
What's wrong with designer babies, cosmetic gene editing, and super-brain edits?
Novartis is a pharmaceutical with a portfolio of 90+ drugs in the US market. Ritalin is a well known drug that Novartis owns. So why should we believe a study with Novartis as the author when they stand to lose significantly if some diseases are cured instead of just treated with drugs. ( FYI I am not suggesting ADHD is treatable with genetic editing ) Karolinska Institute is Swedish as well -- i am implying that since Novartis is a Swedish company and the institute is Swedish they could have help fund the other corroborating study -- and we don't know who gave them funding.
Give me a study from a body that is truly dependent and has something to lose from killing CRISPR like ACS.
I think that the scientists are unworthy of grants.
Hi Donald - glad to see you are diversifying from twitter but sadly, no, that's still not how science works. Scientific grants are paid to fund research to find out what actually happens, you are thinking of "political contributions" which are paid to guarantee a particular result.
n/t
I have noticed that cowards are the loudest to decent, and the first to beg.
Human (and to a lesser extent primate) brain size has been related to a repeating gene group error
just sayin...
Avada Cancerdavra!!!
What could possibly go wrong ?
For literally years, I have been keeping untold trillions or quadrillions of cells that I subsequently integrated into my own body, mostly from leafy green plants called lettuces, in a CRISPER! I could get CANCER from that?!? Shit... I thought the biggest danger was E. Coli...
Well, then, I have good news. You can already do that with in vitro fertilization, which is commercially available and does not require editing genes at all.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Can I get a designer baby with blue skin, infra-vision and who shoots ebola from their fingertips? Man, this is so cool, just like playing Gamma-World!
People who use CRISPR to cure a cancerous disease probably wouldn't mind an increased chance in the edited cells to turn cancerous.
CRISPR doesn't just trigger cancer, it also triggers anti-science snowflakes from the bio"tech" industry too.
***USERNAME CHECKS OUT***
This is a good thing, they found out and made ir public unlike Bayer.
I really like your post because it will be useful for readers so thanks for writing such useful information. Large Garbage Bags Online India
Sounds like this editor is incompatible with DNA.
Probably the old End Of Line issue, so...
1. Edit with CRISPR-Cas9
2. dos2unix
3. Profit
If they think CRISPR would be useful for selecting sex of a child, they should probably spend 10 minutes reading up on human genetics and 5 minutes on CRISPR and find out that CRISPR would never be used for something so simple as sex selection. Also, sex selection is far outside of the scope of what CRISPR can do.
But marginal differences in brain size don't correlate to anything. Sure, if your brain shrinks due to disease it stops working so well, but that's the effect of brain damage.
Brain performance is still pretty mysterious, but it clearly emerges from complexity, organization and behavior, not gross size.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Why would you put something as undeadly as AIDS in that cocktail?
I mean, AIDS is bad, but compared to those others, it is pretty ok.
I'm not sure that gene editing immediately leads to "designer" babies, except in the most superficial way. Sure, you can change things like hair, eye, or skin color, but most parents are going to be interested in those things; they'll be more interested in editing out genetic diseases like Huntington's.
I'm not sure that plastic surgery immediately leads to "designed" bodies, except in the most superficial way. Sure, you can change things like breast size or tummy flatness, but most patients aren't going to be interested in those things; they'll be more interested in fixing burn damage or developmental defects.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You are so fucking stupid, it's almost amazing that you're even alive. People have been working on cancer and Parkinson's for decades. They aren't going to stop now, when something like CRISPr makes their efforts more likely to be productive.
What's wrong with designer babies, cosmetic gene editing, and super-brain edits?
They cause cancer
So, you think plastic surgery is morally wrong?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So in very related news, that might render this problem void:
CRISPR-Cas9 Improved 10,000-Fold by Synthetic Nucleotides
"Scientists at the University of Alberta in Canada have developed a technology that can dramatically improve the specificity of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing. The approach uses synthetic guide molecules known as bridged nucleic acids (BNAs) in place of the system’s native guide RNAs (gRNAs) to direct the Cas9 enzyme to its target DNA sequence, and so reduce off-target DNA cleavage."
https://www.genengnews.com/gen...
So, you think plastic surgery is morally wrong?
I don't think designer babies are morally wrong, unless they are designed by the government (or similar) and they tell you what you're having. I was poking holes in the argument. Of course people want designer babies.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
My "argument" was to take the emotional weight of the term "designer babies" off the table and look at how it was likely to be used. Yes, the result could be called a "designer baby", but so could surgery to correct a cleft palate.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If you give the cancer cancer, it kills itself off! ;)
Win-win.
(Yes I'm joking.)
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
I would say it all boils down to how it's used. If a rich, elite couple specifically wants a daughter, with green eyes, red hair, but say, not too many freckles, that's a designer baby and I think the elite would jump all over that.
However I would expect that the public would view using CRISPR to prevent a child from having an abnormal condition like cleft palette or club foot as basically just medicine, in the same way that plastic surgery, when used for a medically unnecessary nose job is viewed as designer, but grafting skin on a burn victim is medicine.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
I would think the most likely reason someone would use to alter a child's appearance would be in the case of IVF with donated eggs or sperm. But even so, even if we had the technology to edit zygote genomes, you wouldn't be able to specify an appearance to the degree of specificity you're imagining.
When the human genome was sequenced it turned out to be far, far smaller than anyone had expected. This is because genes and traits don't have a one-to-one correspondence; traits are the result of the interaction of many genes, and of course the environment.
Freckles is one of the few genetic traits that is controlled by a single, known gene. Skin and hair color, hair texture, ear lobe attachment, hairline, are all polygenic traits whose precise basis is not characterized. We are beginning to understand the genes behind nose shape, but those also affect ear and chin shape as well, so even if you could specify a nose shape it may have other consequences. Given the the complex interaction of genes it takes to form the genetic basis of most traits, that's bound to be the norm: choices have consequences you might not want.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Thanks, that was pretty enlightening.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Karolinska Institute and, separately, Novartis
Novartis? haven't they been less than ethical these past few decades?
hrrrrmmmm
Well of course! In a capitalist society, anything that isn't purely superficial or a weapon is a future sale killer. We can't have sales being killed now can we? Those shareholders don't enrich themselves you know.
Where is the profit in a cure. There is more money to be made in prolonged treatment for life.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Hopefully you are the first one to contract the designer viruses created by some mad scientist in his mom's basement with CRiSPR. Could it help treat some diseases, sure. However, you have the mentality of a six-year old in a candy store: it can only be all-good right? No such thing as a double-edged sword? Go back to sleep, idiot.
Oh come now, surely you can tell from advertising that people place a far higher value on having a bigger penis, than they do on curing dementia!