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Looks like the Fall is finally here in the north east, so enjoy the weather and have a great weekend!
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By now, all High Fidelity readers should be familiar with CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing and how it allows you to insert or delete a DNA base. You’ve probably also read about the patent dispute over its ownership between the Broad Institute and the University of California. But it has limitations. For example, what if you wanted to edit or fix a point mutation in the base, not delete or replace it? Traditional CRISPR-Cas 9 won’t be much help there. Announced earlier this week in articles in both Nature and Science, the Broad Institute launched CRISPR-Cas 13. These point mutations make up approximately 32,000 of the 50,000 plus changes in human DNA that are known to be associated with diseases. In a way, CRISPR-Cas 9 is like a chainsaw for hacking away large chunks of DNA, while the Cas 13 version is more like scissors for changing one base pair. Since this can allow someone to re-write a genetic coding error such as turning an A-T base pair to a G-C pair. This amazing tool could one day be used to treat a wide range of inherited disease that do not have other treatment options.
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Dartmouth physicist and writer Marcelo Gleiser penned a very interesting story for NPR this week comparing how science today is questioned by those who know nothing about it to how science was treated in the time of Galileo. In the 17th century, it was the Catholic church repressing scientific advances that differed from their view (think the universe revolves around the Earth . . .), and those stubborn views led to persecution and wars. Most people don’t believe the Earth is flat today, but that hasn’t stopped people challenging reproducible scientific evidence of vaccines or climate change for political reasons. Dr. Gleiser noted that even though Galileo and Johannes Kepler were persecuted and, sometimes, feared for their lives, they believed in science and the freedom of ideas, and so kept working at it. He concludes this piece quite eloquently with: “At least, as history has shown, political and ideological repression passes, but scientific knowledge remains. Let us work to ensure that the damage is not irreversible.”
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A non-profit partially funded by the Arnold Foundation has filed the first ever patent challenge on Gilead’s Hepatitis C drug. The group, I-MAK, argues that the six core patents of sofosbuvir, the backbone compound driving the therapies Sovaldi®, Harvoni® and Epclusa®, does not meet the legal standards for novelty and non-obviousness. If they win the challenge, this will allow generic versions of this drug, saving taxpayers $10 Billion and leading wider treatment of many more patients.
Gene-altering cancer immunotherapies are the hot new drugs after the FDA approved the first Car-T therapy last month. The second received approval earlier this week to treat an aggressive form of non-Hodgkins’s lymphoma, a blood cancer, in patents who have had two regimes of chemo that did not work. Like the first Car-T, the patient pool is small while these therapies are better understood, as this one has about 3,500 potential patients a year.
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As fish populations continue to decrease each year, a neat startup is trying to solve a portion of that. Some of the fish caught each year is processed into fishmeal – fish food – for fish farms and live stock. NovoNutrients has a proof of concept that feeds industrial emissions and CO2 to microbes edited via synthetic biology, and they turn around and produce vitamins and nutrients that replace the need for fish in fish food. Good for the environment and for oceans. You should see some of the other neat syn bio ideas seeking funding here http://engineeringbiologycenter.org/pilotprojects/
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