CRISPR’s New Way Of Gene Editing
Year: 2021
While there have been discussions about gene editing for years, where even shows like Star Trek discussed the idea…nothing existed. It was all potentially possible but theoretical until it wasn’t. Gene editing had been picking up more and more in the 2000s but by June 2021, CRISPR took things to a new level. Its Cas-9 gene editor was injected directly into the bloodstream of a patient with a rare inherited disease. Of course, cells are normally extracted from a patient and CRISPR would work on them in a lab before edited genes were returned to the body. The result was that not only did the treatment work where genes were properly edited, but the person did not need to go through a time-consuming process or chemotherapy. The latter is often done in these cases due to potential issues from the editing.