Dr Kevin Davies Discusses Progress Made With CRISPR

In this interview, Kevin Davies, PhD, executive editor, The CRISPR Journal and GEN Biotechnology, and author of Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing, discusses the various ways in which CRISPR technology has seen success and potential areas for future application.

Transcript

How have precision medicine and genomic editing changed since The Human Genome Project was launched?

In the aftermath of The Human Genome Project, there was some progress in gene editing using other technologies. But it's really CRISPR that has made gene editing a clinical reality. Hundreds of patients have either recently or are currently being treated using CRISPR.

CRISPR was developed around 2012 to 2013 in some landmark articles, most of them published in the journal Science, and from that time, scientists have built a toolbox that allows them to edit the DNA of all organisms—but of course, we're mostly interested in humans—and to tackle a growing list of diseases as well as use CRISPR in the context of CAR T [chimeric antigen receptor T-cell] therapies for various types of leukemia and other cancers. The progress is astonishing.

The Nobel Prize for the basic underlying technology was awarded to Jennifer Doudna [PhD] and Emmanuelle Charpantier [PhD], who had been collaborating on the early years of this technology; that was 2020. And now in 2023, we're seeing a growing number of clinical trials, and the most spectacular success so far has come in sickle cell disease. Dozens of patients have not only been successfully treated, we might say essentially cured of sickle cell disease, which when you think about the century-long history of sickle cell—from when it was first reported in the Western medical literature and the struggles that patients with sickle cell disease have experienced, and sometimes the outright discrimination—the fact that now some of these patients are seeing absolute cures, no pain crises, no blood transfusions, it is a stunning development. And we hope this can be translated to many other patients with many other diseases going forward.