5 ways CRISPR will save your life – Red Bull

Microsoft-founder Bill Gates told Wired magazine in 2010 that if he'd started hacking today, he wouldnt have bothered with computers but focused on biology instead. Taking the potential of CRISPR into consideration, its easy to see why.

Hacking biology includes techniques like editing genes and telling a living organism from the size of a single cell to a complex mammal, like ourselves, to do things differently. We've been doing this for a while, creating new kinds of food, medicines and making cats glow in the dark.

One problem was that these methods for editing genes were expensive and imprecise. Past tense, because of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, or CRISPR for short. CRISPR works much like a DNA-level pair of scissors and glue stick. It dramatically lowers the bar for biotech innovation, making it 99 percent cheaper to edit genes, not to mention much more precise. As a result, just about anyone with a good idea, motivation and a little technical savvy can get into bioengineering and biohacking. But dont just take my word for it.

Here are five ways that CRISPR can revolutionise how we do things, and save lives along the way.

One of the biggest health issues today is how bacteria are becoming resistant to an increasing number of antibiotics. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO): Antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security and development today.

We use antibiotics in areas like healthcare and farming to fight infections. Antibiotics fight bacteria in different ways, like blocking their ability to multiply or attack their cell walls. However, bacteria are incredibly good at mutating and some of those mutations make them capable of fighting antibiotics. Once a mutation has proven beneficial, it spreads like lightning, and the dark side now seems like it's winning the arms race.

However, scientists are working on CRISPR in a pill form. The pill carries DNA messages that insert themselves into the bacterias genetic code and tells it to destroy itself. While it's still early days, these pills have the potential to turn the tide in the fight against drug-resistant bacteria.

Humans have been changing plants and animals for millennia. That's how we got everything from high-yield corn to dogs. Recently, we started genetically modifying crops and introducing foreign DNA into an organism. This is similar to the selective breeding that got us RarePuppers, although much faster.

CRISPR makes it possible speed up that process even more, while also making it more precise. Finally, it allows for what is known as trait stacking where scientists can target and carry out multiple edits at the same time.

Now, because of basic research in the lab and in the field, we can go straight after the traits we want, Zachary Lippman, professor of biological sciences at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, told Chemical and Engineering News.

That makes it increasingly easy to create complex changes needed to enhance things like drought tolerance.

Before working on curing you, doctors need to be able to tell exactly whats wrong. Here, speed is often key. New research from the Broad Institute shows how CRISPR can be used in connection with identifying diseases like Zika or dengue fever. The kicker is that itll be able to look for many different diseases at the same time, both quickly and cheaply, through analysing blood and saliva.

Its potential has the medical profession more than a little excited.

My head is spinning a little bit because this looks very, very provocative. And exciting. If you had something that could be used as a screening test, very inexpensively and rapidly, that would be a huge advance, particularly if it could detect an array of infectious agents, William Schaffner, professor of infectious diseases and preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told the Washington Post.

More than 10,000 diseases are believed to be tied to genetic modifications or mutations in a single gene. Many of these diseases are hereditary and either difficult or impossible to identify and treat in time.

Jennifer Doudna, one of scientists credited with discovering CRISPR (theres a lot of debate and a lot of lawsuits going on) recently told Wired the following about CRISPR and genetic/hereditary diseases: I think its really likely that in the not-too-distant future it will cure genetic disease, but globally we need to come up with a consensus on moving forward in a responsible way.

Part of the reason is that CRISPRs lower price makes it viable/possible to develop cures for diseases and conditions where R&D cost or the limited number of sufferer has previously been a hindrance.

Cancer often attacks T cells. The cells are part your bodys immune system, and by knocking these cells out, cancer slows the immune response and can thereby spread. Researchers are now using the system to see if it will be possible to reprogram T- cells to resist, and ultimately destroy the cancer.

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5 ways CRISPR will save your life - Red Bull