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Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

(www.nytimes.com)
1165 points jbredeche | 2 comments | 15 May 25 18:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.507s | 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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1. ziofill ◴[16 May 25 05:49 UTC] No.44002188[source]▶
A chemist friend of mine did his thesis on lipid vesicles, and I remember my mind being blown when he told me these are modelled as a liquid on the 2D plane of the membrane, but as a solid on the 1D orthogonal direction because the energy to swap two lipid molecules side by side is incredibly low (because it makes barely any difference), while the energy to swap them orthogonally to the membrane is much larger (because they would point in the wrong direction).
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2. ajkjk ◴[16 May 25 21:26 UTC] No.44009933[source]▶
Oh that's neat