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Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

(www.nytimes.com)
1167 points jbredeche | 3 comments | 15 May 25 18:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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MrZander ◴[15 May 25 19:30 UTC] No.43998447[source]▶
> To accomplish that feat, the treatment is wrapped in fatty lipid molecules to protect it from degradation in the blood on its way to the liver, where the edit will be made. Inside the lipids are instructions that command the cells to produce an enzyme that edits the gene. They also carry a molecular GPS — CRISPR — which was altered to crawl along a person’s DNA until it finds the exact DNA letter that needs to be changed.

That is one of the most incredible things I have ever read.

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poyu ◴[15 May 25 19:46 UTC] No.43998602[source]▶
Made it sound like it's a computer, is it Turing complete?
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1. joshmarlow ◴[15 May 25 22:42 UTC] No.44000096[source]▶
If this thread interests you, you should check out "Blood Music" by Greg Bear. It's pretty old but the premise is that a researcher 'closes the loop' in a bunch of cells by making them able to edit their own DNA - thus making them Turing Complete.

Hilarity subsequently ensues.

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2. dekhn ◴[15 May 25 22:58 UTC] No.44000194[source]▶
Cells are already able to edit their own DNA. Examples include the yeast mating switch, in which the "active" gene is replaced by one of two templates, determining the role the yeast plays in mating (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mating_of_yeast#Mechanics_of_t...)

Further, your immune system does some clever combinatorial swapping to achieve diversity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination). The generated diversity is then screened by the immune system to find highly effective antibodies that bind to specific foreign invaders.

Doing something actually interesting from an engineering perspective makes for fun science fiction, but as always, the specific details in that story would be a very unlikely outcome.

3. xarope ◴[16 May 25 05:52 UTC] No.44002204[source]▶
As I get older, I'd be happy with some minor incremental progress on addressing myopia and hyperopia.