Nature is reporting that a Chinese team will attempt to treat lung cancer with CRISPR-modified cells in August. From the article:
A team led by Lu You, an oncologist at Sichuan University's West China Hospital in Chengdu, plans to start testing such cells in people with lung cancer next month. The clinical trial received ethical approval from the hospital's review board on 6 July.
"It's an exciting step forward," says Carl June, a clinical researcher in immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
There have been a number of human clinical trials using an alternative gene-editing technique, including one led by June, that have helped patients combat HIV. June is also a scientific adviser on a planned US trial that would also use CRISPR-Cas9-modified cells for the treatment of cancer.
Last month, an advisory panel of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) approved that project. But the trial also requires a green light from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and a university review board. The US researchers have said they could start their clinical trial by the end of this year.
[Continues...]
[...] Lu says that the review process, which took half a year, required that the team invest a lot of time and human resources, including close communication with the hospital's internal review board (IRB). "There was a lot of back and forth," he says. The NIH's approval of the other CRISPR trial "strengthened ours and our IRB's confidence in this study", he adds.
China has had a reputation for moving fast -- sometimes too fast -- with CRISPR, says Tetsuya Ishii, a bioethicist at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan.
According to Lu, his team was able to move fast because they are experienced with clinical trials of cancer treatments.
June is not surprised that a Chinese group would jump out in front on a trial such as this: "China places a high priority on biomedical research," he says.
Ishii notes that if the clinical trial begins as planned, it would be the latest in a series of firsts for China in the field of CRISPR gene editing, including the first CRISPR-edited human embryos, and the first CRISPR-edited monkeys. "When it comes to gene editing, China goes first," says Ishii.
"I hope we are the first," says Lu. "And more importantly, I hope we can get positive data from the trial."
(Score: 2) by gringer on Friday July 22 2016, @08:04PM
"Doping? nope! I'm just designed better."
"In what way?"
"My left index finger is fluorescent green, and my kidney produces small amounts of chlorophyll when I'm injected with diptheria toxin."
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 22 2016, @08:54PM
What is this, some kind of attempt to defend your profession by downplaying its capabilities?
http://www.scielo.br/pdf/bjps/v48n3/a03v48n3.pdf [scielo.br]
Why don't you talk about myostatin inhibition? Because it could actually be effective in improving athletic ability, that's why. It might not even require germline editing to be useful.
Let's not forget that CRISPR gene editing went from a dismissed/overlooked idea to reality to useful in a very short amount of time. Alternate enzymes can be used, possibly with greater efficiency than Cas9. Improvements in sequencing will make it cheaper to sequence more genomes and locate genes that could be used to influence intelligence, athletics, and appearance.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 22 2016, @11:20PM
Olympics + Brazilian site + PDF ?= Zika on a computer
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday July 23 2016, @01:29AM
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1984-82502012000300003&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en [scielo.br]
http://search.crossref.org/?q=Myostatin%3A+genetic+variants%2C+therapy+and+gene+doping [crossref.org]
DOI: 10.1590/S1984-82502012000300003
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(Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday July 23 2016, @01:28AM
It wouldn't open for me. Here's an alternate link: https://archive.is/XA0RW [archive.is]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 23 2016, @06:00AM
dismissed/overlooked idea
Reference? Everyone that I knew were very excited about it when it was first found out. Before anyone did any editing, it was an amazing system of adaptive immunity in bacteria.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday July 23 2016, @06:36AM
I think I loosely based it off this, but it doesn't really support my statement:
DOI: 10.1089/hum.2015.091
Then there's this:
https://www.broadinstitute.org/files/news/pdfs/PIIS0092867415017055.pdf [broadinstitute.org]
DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2015.12.041
That article is disputed here [nature.com].
I'll take a look at it again later.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by gringer on Saturday July 23 2016, @08:17AM
It was an attempt at humour. Making things fluorescent green is one of the first things people do now when they genetically modify organisms. See here, for example:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/01/080109-pig-glow.html [nationalgeographic.com]
A diptheria toxin function is another favourite among biologists. This one has both a diptheria modification and a green fluorescent protein modification:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1809468/ [nih.gov]
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]