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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has already dodged two potentially fatal bullets -- a 2017 claim that it causes sky-high numbers of off-target effects was retracted in March, and a report of human immunity to Cas9 was largely shrugged off as solvable.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.
The article addresses this. P53 is like the ECC of the DNA. It detects errors and then either self destructs the cell or fixes the 'damage'. The concern is that CRISPR weakens the p53 response and therefore the natural Error Correction processes of the cells which normally terminate tumorous dna damage.
However, the cancer treatments using CRISPR (and several other CRISPR therapies) don't rely on p53
CRISPR-based editing of T cells to treat cancer, as scientists at the University of Pennsylvania are studying in a clinical trial, should also not have a p53 problem. Nor should any therapy developed with CRISPR base editing, which does not make the double-stranded breaks that trigger p53.
There are apparently two methods by which CRISPR alters the genes. One is by slicing the bad parts of the gene (this is the approach I believe is being used for the First-in-human Phase 1 trials about to begin in US), and the other is by replacing the bad parts of the gene by healthy parts. The latter method is what apparently increases the risk of tumors.