“Aging reversal is something that’s been proven about eight different ways in animals,” geneticist George Church says. So when will humans get to turn back the clock? Church tells 60 Minutes it’s not that far away. See the full report, Sunday.
Category: genetics – Page 416
New tool for rapidly analyzing CRISPR edits reveals frequent production of unintended edits
Amidst rising hopes for using CRISPR gene editing tools to repair deadly mutations linked to conditions like cystic fibrosis and sickle cell disease, a study in Communications Biology describes a new innovation that could accelerate this work by rapidly revealing unintended and potentially harmful changes introduced by a gene editing process.
“We’ve developed a new process for rapidly screening all of the edits made by CRISPR, and it shows there may be many more unintended changes to DNA around the site of a CRISPR repair than previously thought,” said Eric Kmiec, Ph.D., director of ChristianaCare’s Gene Editing Institute and the principle author of the study.
The study describes a new tool developed at the Gene Editing Institute that in just 48 hours can identify “multiple outcomes of CRISPR-directed gene editing,” a process that typically required up to two months of costly and complicated DNA analysis.
Researchers program cancer-fighting cells to resist exhaustion, attack solid tumors in mice
Awesome!
A new approach to programing cancer-fighting immune cells called CAR-T cells can prolong their activity and increase their effectiveness against human cancer cells grown in the laboratory and in mice, according to a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
The ability to circumvent the exhaustion that the genetically engineered cells often experience after their initial burst of activity could lead to the development of a new generation of CAR-T cells that may be effective even against solid cancers—a goal that has until now eluded researchers.
The studies were conducted in mice harboring human leukemia and bone cancer cells. The researchers hope to begin clinical trials in people with leukemia within the next 18 months and to eventually extend the trials to include solid cancers.
World must prepare for biological weapons that target ethnic groups based on genetics, says Cambridge University
Biological weapons could be built which target individuals in a specific ethnic group based on their DNA, a report by the University of Cambridge has warned.
Researchers from Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) said the government was failing to prepare for ‘human-driven catastrophic risks’ that could lead to mass harm and societal collapse.
In recent years advances in science such as genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous vehicles have opened the door to a host of new threats.
First experimental genetic evidence of the human self-domestication hypothesis
A new University of Barcelona study reveals the first empirical genetic evidence of human self-domestication, a hypothesis that humans have evolved to be friendlier and more cooperative by selecting their companions depending on their behaviour. Researchers identified a genetic network involved in the unique evolutionary trajectory of the modern human face and prosociality, which is absent in the Neanderthal genome. The experiment is based on Williams Syndrome cells, a rare disease.
The study, published in Science Advances, results from the collaboration between a UB team led by Cedric Boeckx, ICREA professor from the Section of General Linguistics at the Department of Catalan Philology and General Linguistics, and member of the Institute of Complex Systems of the UB (UBICS), and researchers from the team led by Giuseppe Testa, lecturer at the University of Milan and the European Institute of Oncology.
A New Crispr Technique Could Fix Almost All Genetic Diseases
Anzalone’s prime editor is a little different. Its enzyme is actually two that have been fused together—a molecule that acts like a scalpel combined with something called a reverse transcriptase, which converts RNA into DNA. His RNA guide is a little different too: It not only finds the DNA in need of fixing, but also carries a copy of the edit to be made. When it locates its target DNA, it makes a little nick, and the reverse transcriptase starts adding the corrected sequence of DNA letter by letter, like the strikers on a typewriter.
A less error-prone DNA editing method could correct many more harmful mutations than was previously possible.