2min chapter

The TED Interview cover image

The science and ethics of rewriting our DNA | Jennifer Doudna

The TED Interview

CHAPTER

Can Crisper Really Edit Cells in Animal Models of Genetic Disease?

In em ancan can crisper actually live edit in a living adult like millions and millions of different cells, enough to effect the kind of biological impact that that revised dna would need to change our biology? Ah, yes. Great question. So one of the things that's very interesting about crisper is that we're already learning in various animal models of genetic disease that in many cases, first of all, it's not necessary to edit the d na every cell in the animal to have a therapeutic benefit. And secondly, in many cases, you only need to edit cells in one kind of tissue. Maybe you only need to get to the liver or the brain, or the heart or

00:00
Speaker 2
And can you just help my mental model for how that actually happens? Like, it's easy to imagine, if you edit an embryo cell, owhow like, a body can gr where every cell then has that in its d an a. But i'm already here, and i've got trillions of cells. I think it is e all with the wrong d and a. In em ancan can crisper actually live edit in a living adult like millions and millions of different cells, enough to effect the kind of biological impact that that revised dna would need to actually change our biology.
Speaker 1
Ah, yes. Great question. So one of the things that's very interesting about crisper is that we're already learning in various animal models of genetic disease that in many cases, first of all, it's not necessary to edit the d na every cell in the animal to have a therapeutic benefit. In fact, in many cases, you only need to, you know, a small fraction of the cells. And secondly, in many cases, you only need to edit cells in one kind of tissue. So you mighte not need to get to every cell in the body. Maybe you only need to get to the liver or the brain, or the heart or the muscle, and so there. You know, i it's already possible to do the kind of crisper mediated manipulation, again, in animal models that has a therapeutic benefit. A lot of times, the editing is done in cells that are a progenerative, you know, there we call them stem cells. Theiare cells that have the ability, once they get going, to differentiate into a a liver ell or some other tissue type. And so if crisperis used to edit those types of stem cells, then they can actually provide enough edited cells, as those cells start to grow and divide, to provide a therapeutic benefit.

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