On this episode of Anti-Aging Hacks show, we get into the following topics:
1. What is Gene Therapy and how Practical is it?
2. How Gene Therapies or Gene Editing help you Stop Aging, Build Muscle and Fight Disease?
3. Could you take your body back to your much younger self?
My guest is Liz Parrish, and Liz is a humanitarian, entrepreneur, innovator, and a leading voice for genetic cures. As a strong proponent of progress and education for the advancement of regenerative medicine modalities, she serves as a motivational speaker to the public at large for the life sciences. She is actively involved in international educational media outreach and is a founding member of the International Longevity Alliance (ILA).
The program, called Somatic Cell Genome Editing, will be investing $190 million. (2018)
Last year, I wrote about a team of Chinese scientists having received ethical approval to perform a clinical trial of gene-editing. The goal was to test whether gene-editing may be a potential cure for cancer. The technology used for the trial is called CRISPR/Cas9, not exactly a household name. CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. Cas9 stands for CRISPR associated protein 9, an RNA-guided DNA endonuclease enzyme. If you read all these words a few times, it can make your head hurt. The topic is complex, but I hope in this post to make it more understandable.
After reading about CRISPR more than a few times, I think I finally get the concept. I may not have this 100% right, but following is what I believe it is about. To imagine what gene-editing is, consider editing of a video. The software shows you each frame of the video. You select a frame you want to edit and display the frame in video editing software. You make the changes to look the way you want the frame to look, and then insert the frame back into the video. For example, the original video may have contained an unneeded “um” or “ah” or “eh” which added no value to the video.
Now, consider the similarity with gene-editing. The human body has T-cells which are an active participant in our immune system. A gene in the T-cells can produce a protein called PD-1 which disables the T-cells’ ability to trigger an immune response to fight cancer. A team of oncologists removed cells from an advanced stage lung cancer patient and edited the cells using CRISPR-Cas9. After editing out the gene which blocks the immune response, the cells were cultured and multiplied and then injected back into the patient.
While the public is still imagining the future to be very much like the past, the researchers at the forefront of genetics are planning to redesign human bodies, to make us more long-lived, more resilient to disease, more strong and (I hope) more intelligent.
In a talk at Exponential Medicine, Jane Metcalfe said that tools like gene editing and synthetic biology could make design the next big thing in medicine.
Biology encodes information in DNA and RNA, which are complex molecules finely tuned to their functions. But are they the only way to store hereditary molecular information? Some scientists believe life as we know it could not have existed before there were nucleic acids, thus understanding how they came to exist on the primitive Earth is a fundamental goal of basic research. The central role of nucleic acids in biological information flow also makes them key targets for pharmaceutical research, and synthetic molecules mimicking nucleic acids form the basis of many treatments for viral diseases, including HIV. Other nucleic acid-like polymers are known, yet much remains unknown regarding possible alternatives for hereditary information storage. Using sophisticated computational methods, scientists from the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and Emory University explored the “chemical neighbourhood” of nucleic acid analogues. Surprisingly, they found well over a million variants, suggesting a vast unexplored universe of chemistry relevant to pharmacology, biochemistry and efforts to understand the origins of life. The molecules revealed by this study could be further modified to gives hundreds of millions of potential pharmaceutical drug leads.
The tiny hydra, a freshwater invertebrate related to jellyfish and corals, has an amazing ability to renew its cells and regenerate damaged tissue. Cut a hydra in half, and it will regenerate its body and nervous system in a couple of days. Researchers at the University of California, Davis have now traced the fate of hydra’s cells, revealing how three lines of stem cells become nerves, muscles or other tissues.
Celina Juliano, assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, project scientist Stefan Siebert and colleagues including Jeff Farrell, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, sequenced the RNA transcripts of 25,000 single hydra cells to follow the genetic trajectory of nearly all differentiated cell types.
“The beauty of single-cell sequencing and why this is such a big deal for developmental biologists is that we can actually capture the genes that are expressed as cells differentiate from stem cells into their different cell types,” Juliano said.
The philosophy that we should merge with machines to expand our intelligence and extend life is gaining traction. Design, scientific and technological frontiers are being pushed to redefine nature through AI, AR, biotech, genetics, and VR.
Questionable startups are claiming to be able to determine how smart a frozen IVF embryo will become if carried to term, and parents are taking the bait.
Genomic Prediction, the most prominent of these companies, offers tests to scan embryos for genetic diseases and other conditions — as well as genetic indicators that a future child will be in the bottom two percent of intelligence.
And MIT Technology Reviewreports that Genomic Prediction co-founder Stephen Hsu often uses media appearances to discuss future plans for a general intelligence test — something that, with current tech, is extremely unlikely to actually work.
City of Hope researchers may have found a way to sharpen the fastest, cheapest and most accurate gene editing technique, CRISPR-Cas9, so that it can more successfully cut out undesirable genetic information.
This improved cutting ability could one day fast-track potential therapies for HIV, sickle cell disease and, potentially, other immune conditions.
“Our CRISPR-Cas9 design may be the difference between trying to cut a ribeye steak with a butter knife versus slicing it with a steak knife,” said Tristan Scott, Ph.D., lead author of the study and a staff research scientist at City of Hope’s Center for Gene Therapy. “Other scientists have tried to improve CRISPR cutting through chemical modifications, but that’s an expensive process and is like diamond-coating a blade. Instead, we have designed a better pair of scissors you can buy at any convenience store.”
