{"id":100378,"date":"2020-01-02T00:03:54","date_gmt":"2020-01-02T08:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/gene-therapies-make-it-to-clinical-trials"},"modified":"2020-01-02T00:03:54","modified_gmt":"2020-01-02T08:03:54","slug":"gene-therapies-make-it-to-clinical-trials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/gene-therapies-make-it-to-clinical-trials","title":{"rendered":"Gene Therapies Make it to Clinical Trials"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/gene-therapies-make-it-to-clinical-trials.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>After years of ethical debates and breakthroughs in the lab, CRISPR has finally made its way to clinical trials. Researchers are now looking at whether the DNA-editing tool, as well as more conventional gene therapies, can effectively treat a wide array of heritable disorders and even cancers.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere\u2019s been a convergence of the science getting better, the manufacturing getting much better, and money being available for these kinds of studies,\u201d says Cynthia Dunbar, a senior investigator at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. \u201cIt\u2019s truly come of age.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>CRISPR \u2014 formally known as CRISPR-Cas9 \u2014 has been touted as an improvement over conventional gene therapy because of its potential precision. CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) is a genetic code that, contained in a strand of RNA and paired with the enzyme Cas9, acts like molecular scissors that can target and snip out specific genes. Add a template for a healthy gene, and CRISPR\u2019s cut can allow the cell to replace a defective gene with a healthy one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After years of ethical debates and breakthroughs in the lab, CRISPR has finally made its way to clinical trials. Researchers are now looking at whether the DNA-editing tool, as well as more conventional gene therapies, can effectively treat a wide array of heritable disorders and even cancers. \u201cThere\u2019s been a convergence of the science getting [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":542,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,412],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/542"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100378\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}