CRISPR has broad implications for advances in health
In the wake of this major breakthrough, UVA Today asked University of Virginia public policy professor Randall Lutter to explain the impact of this new technology. Now a member of the faculty at UVA's Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, Lutter is a former deputy commissioner for policy at the Food and Drug Administration, where he had a leadership role in efforts to regulate genetically engineered animals.
Below, he discusses the future of genome-editing and recent FDA updates to address it.
Q. How is genome-editing different from the older processes for creating genetically modified organisms, or GMOs?
A. Using genome-editing techniques such as CRISPR, scientists can cut a cell's genome at a desired location so that existing genes can be removed, or new ones added. Older techniques differed by requiring the introduction of genetic material from a different species and thus were sometimes called "transgenic."
To date, the precise editing has been shown to be successful at creating organisms with a wide variety of desired traits, even when there is no introduction of genetic material from a different species. The results of such genome editing could, in principle, occur naturally.
CRISPR, unlike older technologies, may also be used to affect heritable traits even in wild populations. Through the use of a genetic system called a "gene drive," an edit can be made that will create an organism with a new trait in a way that it also occurs in the offspring of that organism with very high probability. This can happen even when the other "wild" parent lacks the new trait. Thus the new trait would be expected to spread throughout the wild population – a development with extraordinary implications.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-01-future-genome.html#jCp
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