Page 16 - Christiana Care Focus August 2018

CRISPR
Gene Editing 360
Experts address ethical, legal and insurance issues surrounding CRISPR gene editing technology
The subject of TV news programs and magazine headlines, CRISPR gene editing technology is spearheading a biomedical revolution.
Scientists are working to alter mosquito DNA to prevent malaria and modify pig organs for human transplant. The Gene Editing Institute of Christiana Care Health System is researching the use of CRISPR in lung cancer treatments.
But who owns CRISPR and its related technologies? Will insurance pay for gene editing procedures, and is it ethical to change human DNA?
Experts addressed these questions on June 8 during CRISPR Gene Editing 360: From Laboratory Science to Ethical Application, a symposium held at the John H. Ammon Medical Education Center at Christiana Hospital in Newark.
The event was organized by Christiana Care and the Delaware BioScience Association.
“CRISPR is arguably the hottest life-science technology, and it’s moving very quickly,” said Helen Stimson, president and CEO of the Delaware BioScience Association.
Eric Kmiec, Ph.D., director of the Gene Editing Institute, agreed. “This revolutionary technology is moving forward into the public domain much faster than any of us anticipated,” he said. “We do
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have a tremendous amount of enthusiasm, but at the same time,
the reason we are sitting in this room today is because scientists,
in general, are concerned about how these technologies affect the public. That’s a really good sign. We’re happy to host this conference. The gene editing revolution is here.”
He explained CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) by comparing it to a word processing program that can cut, insert and replace information. “We use
Cmolecular tools to do the same thing with genes,” he said.
RISPR is precise. “If we imagine the genome as being a book with 1,000 pages, and each page contains 1,000 words, and there are 3,000 copies of this book, scientists with CRISPR can pinpoint one word — in fact, one letter — on page 91 on
volume 1,349. That’s why we call it a revolution,” he said.
Therapeutic applications vary from gene therapy to controlling obesity. The Gene Editing Institute at Christiana Care’s Helen F. Graham Cancer Center & Research Institute is researching how CRISPR can reduce the amount of chemotherapy needed to treat lung cancer, the leading cause of death in Delaware.
In addition to the many lives it could save, the technology has the potential to earn billions of dollars for organizations with patents. “CRISPR certainly has garnered a lot of attention in the legal com- munity, and to me, that’s a reflection of the breakthrough nature of