Tech Review warns of a possible investment scam?
Having something better than CRISPR would be high-impact. But Homology's scientific results aren't yet widely accepted. In fact, several scientists told MIT Technology Review that they believe the claims are probably wrong.
"What's surprising is this company raised so much money on something thought to be untrue in the scientific community," says David Russell, a researcher at the University of Washington, in Seattle. "I think there is just a gene-editing frenzy."
Something about specially designed viruses that don't have to "slash open" human genes to change them. Sounds like something the herd (Wall St speculators) would be happy to get behind.
The paper has not yet been published, but here are some additional links to further information:
From Dr. Lowe's "In the Pipeline" blog - http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/08/31/good-craziness-and-bad-craziness
Conference abstract on the research - http://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/4399/presentation/1352
AAV vectors -- use in gene therapy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adeno-associated_virus#Use_in_gene_therapy
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 03 2017, @05:35PM (2 children)
CRISPR was not involved at all - it's right in the title.
The whole point of the study was to find AAV vectors that were more efficient at mediating recombination in HSCs.
DNA sequencing does not demonstrate transcriptional activity. Sustained GFP expression is also a form of independent confirmation that the sequencing data isn't a result of sequence contamination.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 03 2017, @05:43PM (1 child)
Yea, sorry. I just grouped it in as "editing" and forgot we aren't talking about CRISPR here.
Let's see what their purpose was in measuring fluorescence: "Editing was measured by GFP expression".
They are trying to measure editing, not transcriptional activity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 03 2017, @07:11PM
The full quote is relevant.
The GFP phenotype implies a functional gene and can be used as a quantifiable measure of efficiency, depending on how you perform the assay. Flow cytometric analysis, likely what was used, could provide quantification of the number of cells that became GFP positive as a result of the treatment.
GFP signal alone would not be sufficient as a measure of recombination efficiency, but it acts as a good proxy. Sequencing data can provide a quantification of efficiency as well if the experiments are designed with that in mind.