Editing away cancer and HIV in China: win or lose?
The incredibly efficient and accurate gene-editing technology, CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), is regarded as unsafe for use in humans due to its off-target effects.
However, scientists in China seem to have pushed the boundary, by recently using CRISPR to edit out the CCR5 gene from a type of bone marrow cell called HSPCs, which were then transplanted into a patient with HIV and acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
The resulting donor cells persisted for over 19 months, and the leukemia went into complete remission. However, HIV-affected counts of CD4+ cells were only marginally increased.
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