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Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

(www.nytimes.com)
1168 points jbredeche | 1 comments | 15 May 25 18:06 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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tuna-piano ◴[16 May 25 00:31 UTC] No.44000717[source]▶
If someone in the year 2050 was to pick out the most important news article from 2025, I won't be surprised if they choose this one.

For those who don't understand this stuff - we are now capable of editing some of a body's DNA in ways that predictably change their attributes. The baby's liver now has different (and better) DNA than the rest of its body.

We still are struggling in most cases with how to deliver the DNA update instructions into the body. But given the pace of change in this space, I expect massive improvements with this update process over time.

Combined with AI to better understand the genome, this is going to be a crazy century.

Further reading on related topics:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JEhW3HDMKzekDShva/significan...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DfrSZaf3JC8vJdbZL/how-to-mak...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yT22RcWrxZcXyGjsA/how-to-hav...

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fendy3002 ◴[16 May 25 02:26 UTC] No.44001300[source]▶
the usual next questions will be:

- how further can we push this to make the best, most optimized human?

- what are moral implication of this?

- what are the side effects / downsides?

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1. kjkjadksj ◴[16 May 25 05:42 UTC] No.44002157[source]▶
Low hanging fruit is very low hanging in this case. There are many point mutations for example that confer risk to disease and cancer. Lynch syndrome which confers significant risk for colorectal cancer for example is something that could he cured with transgenic humans today even with todays technology. Just a matter of screening gametes for the mutation (usually one base in the case of Lynch in heterozygous state with wild type healthy allele and that wild type healthy allele gets a second hit mutation as the cancer develops and things just go off the rails from there) and editing that base back to wildtype. No downside only upside with that.

What gets harder are polygenic traits that even today we don’t have great data on what are the causal alleles. But that is also not a technological limitation either but a statistical one from insufficient sampling of these polygenic phenotypes.