Bouncing on a Trampoline.

The next era of gene editing will be disease agnostic.

“Most mornings I learn more from New Items than I do from all of the traditional papers I read combined.” — Michael Blair, former presiding partner, Debevoise & Plimpton.

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1. At the Wired Health summit last week, Harvard biochemist and gene-editing pioneer David Liu said that later this year his lab plans to report on a single gene-editing strategy that could treat many unrelated diseases. He calls it disease-agnostic therapeutic gene editing. “It sounds sort of crazy, but there’s actually a very good molecular biology reason why this could be possible,” he told the audience in Boston, stopping short of details. Gene-editing treatments are currently being developed for several rare and inherited genetic diseases. One gene-editing treatment, called Casgevy, is approved and available commercially to treat sickle cell disease and a related blood disorder called beta thalassemia….. Global Genes, a rare disease advocacy organization, estimates that there are at least 10,000 rare diseases that affect more than 400 million people worldwide. (Source: wired.com, Liu’s CV is here. )

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2. This week, experts in synthetic biology and microbiology, among other fields, are gathering in Manchester, UK, to explore the benefits and risks of building synthetic life. One of the topics that will be discussed is how research might be restricted to prevent the creation of organisms made of components that are the mirror image of those that make up life on Earth. Days after the Manchester meeting, the issue will be examined at a workshop organized by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. And other meetings are planned. Most of the biological molecules known to make up life on Earth have a specific handedness, or chirality. Amino acids have left-handed chirality, for example, whereas DNA is right-handed. Because mirror-image bacteria or other synthetic life forms would be made of molecules of opposite handedness (so with right-handed amino acids and left-handed DNA), the concern is that such organisms might represent a hazard to known life. (Source: nature.com)