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April 18, 2019 – 12:45
PanARMENIAN.Net – Gene editing tool CRISPR was used in an attempt to improve the blood cells of two patients with Cancer, reveals the MIT.
Current experimental research at the University of Pennsylvania involves genetically altering a person's T cells to attack and destroy cancer. A university spokesman confirmed that he had treated the first patients, one with sarcoma and the other with multiple myeloma.
The first pioneering study plans were announced for the first time in 2016, but the startup has been slow. Chinese hospitals have launched about 20 similar efforts. Carl June, the famous cancer doctor at the University of Pennsylvania, compared the Chinese advance in the use of CRISPR to a genetic gene of Sputnik.
It is safer and easier to use the CRISPR technique on cells extracted from a patient's body. This is the case in the new cancer study, in which doctors took patients' blood and then genetically modified the immune cells in the patient before returning them to patients.
The researchers added a gene for the T cells to attack the cancer, but they also used CRISPR to suppress a different gene, called PD-1, that can slow down the immune system's defenses.
Pharmaceutical drugs that inhibit PD-1, known as immunotherapies, have been extremely effective in treating some cancers. Now, the idea is to install the same capacity directly into the T lymphocyte DNA.
The Pennsylvania Cancer Study is just one of many tests of medical treatments using CRISPR in progress. This year, for example, a patient in Europe became the first person to receive CRISPR treatment for a hereditary disease, beta-thalbademia.
The Penn study is funded by the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, an organization created by Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster and former investor on Facebook, as well as a start-up company, Tmunity. Parker compared T-cells to "small computers" that can be reprogrammed.
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