Horrible diseases are being ‘edited out’ of the human body

Some exciting news about the future of medicine was announced today. Unfortunately, you really need a degree in biochemistry – which I certainly don’t have – to understand it. But we’d better get used to that, because the eradication of nasty diseases is increasingly a project for geneticists whose findings are difficult to grasp (but easy to misunderstand).

Editas, described as a ‘leading genome editing company’, has announced the highlights of the 18th annual meeting of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy (ASGCT) in New Orleans. Here’s just one of them:

Gene conversion of the hemoglobin locus: Several CRISPR/Cas9 construct variants were evaluated in vitro to target the human hemoglobin beta gene (HBB) in the region mutated in sickle cell anaemia. The construct containing the Streptococcus pyogenes D10A nickase isoform with selected gRNAs drove in vitro editing to approximately 30 percent of the HBB locus through gene conversion by the hemoglobin delta (HBD) locus.