CRISPR is an extremely overhyped approach which found a marketing engine via popular science. There is 1 FDA approved CRISPR therapy as compared to 7 for AAV and 7 for Lentivirus.
Counting all viral vector therapies that have been approved, we’re sitting at 19 approved therapies versus 1 for CRISPR.
I think CRISPR ideas in a lab are just an easy way into the mainstream press, but viral vector delivery is the real future. It just didn’t get the same news cycle, for whatever reason.
You're correct about CRISPR Cas9. The off-target affects are difficult to manage.
The paper describes Cas12a2. This is a different mechanism with discovery origins in - of all things - agriculture. It does not attempt in any way to reprogram cells. It uses a guide protein to locate a specific mutation with exacting precision and, when it activates, unleashes total destruction of the cell.
The implications of Cas12a2 on undruggable conditions that exhibit known driver mutation profiles is profound.
Source: I have personally funded novel research based on Cas12a2 for an undruggable condition I have. I have personally seen my condition "cured" in vitro using this technology and it left all of my WT cells unharmed. Some of the researchers I've funded are co-authors in the paper linked. I am a layperson in this field (I'm a SWE, not in biotech), but I am happy to answer questions.
Have you written about your experience anywhere? It would be interesting to see how you approached the research sector as a layperson. Are there any plans to move to in vivo? Best of luck with your research!
Seconding this comment. I would love to read a write-up about your experience and how you’ve been trying to work on solutions for yourself. Stories like these are valuable to the field and inspiring to other folks dealing with a tough diagnosis.
If it were to work, gene therapy as-is would be possible. Which it is not,
not even for those overpriced therapies. I have no doubt that sooner or later
it will happen, as the problem space is finite, not infinite, but I simply
don't see the correlation here.
> The implications of Cas12a2 on undruggable conditions that exhibit known driver mutation profiles is profound.
So what does this change exactly? Humans defined it as "undruggable conditions". You can reason this is an improvement, but I still see it in failure-territory. If it were to work, gene therapy would be an accurate - and affordable - technique. Which it is not right now.
> I am a layperson in this field (I'm a SWE, not in biotech), but I am happy to answer questions.
How does "answering questions" offset the technology being inferior right now?
I know nothing about this field, but I imagine the actual problem is how do you deliver the Cas12a2 protein to each individual cancer cell compare to a viral gene therapy?
There are two major problems, delivery is one of them. Collateral damage of mass cell destruction leading to systemic inflammation is the other.
The approach I'm reviewing now uses lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) for delivery. It isn't great for targeting my bone marrow condition but its workable. The team hasn't optimized it at all, either. There are also viral delivery mechanisms that I haven't studied yet.
The collateral damage problem is the backpressure on the delivery problem. If you get really good at delivery, you can destroy A LOT of cells very quickly. The human body (usually) responds to these events by releasing a lot of pro-inflammatory cytokines. This can lead to cytokine storms or worse.
As you "get good" at killing the target cells, the net effect can turn bad. It will probably be a balancing act.
Lipid nanoparticles are quite old as-is. How do you target cells specifically?
> If you get really good at delivery, you can destroy A LOT of cells very quickly.
You can destroy cells quickly. Ok. So the question is: how do you detect specifically only cancer cells via lipid nanoparticles? That was already a problem years ago with Herceptin. The rationale that is always used is that "we need to do something" for certain aggressive cancers. It has never been a super-effective technique, despite all the promo of how monoclonal antibodies are so accurate.
> As you "get good" at killing the target cells, the net effect can turn bad. It will probably be a balancing act.
That's already the status quo in the whole cancer field. I don't think that more than sloppy accuracy is acceptable for any gene therapy - and the off-target cleaving of CRISPR has always been the number #1 problem here.
> So the question is: how do you detect specifically only cancer cells via lipid nanoparticles?
You don't. Healthy cells will also get these nanoparticles, but without the triggering DNA sequence, the mRNA payload will remain inert and eventually will be degraded.
Naively, I would deal with this by deciding how many cells I want to kill each day and then figure out a dosing schedule that achieves that. Or maybe it's better to do one dose every few days. But yeah either way.
Devils advocate, I also vehemently shat on RNAi therapeutics a decade back. We do have RNAi therapies in market now though. I do think Crispr will find its place similarly.
CRIPSR was a game-changer for genetics research. A lot of gene knockout studies use CRISPR. However, it was always weirdly overhyped for clinical use from the beginning and this was obvious to anyone with a genetics background.
The public in general doesn't have a good understanding of basic genetics and I blame high school science curriculums for not covering it well enough. Too much time is wasted on Mendelian genetics without covering the Central Dogma.
You basically cannot "edit" your somatic DNA in a meaningful wholesale way since every single cell in your body has a copy of the DNA, and it's a foolish endeavor. What you can conceivably edit to good effect is your germline DNA, stem cell DNA, or modify mRNA expression (e.g. retinoids; yes putting retinol/adapalene cream on your face is "gene therapy"), or introduce foreign mRNA for your translation machinery to co-opt (e.g. mRNA vaccines).
I disagree that it's "gene therapy" to affect the natural regulation of mRNA production. If that were true then the term "gene therapy" loses its meaning, as just about everything changes the expression of mRNA. You can probably do so somewhere just by thinking really hard about it.
Expressing mRNA that doesn't exist in the genome, that would be gene therapy. Or just a virus.
This approach can work for some genetic diseases such as blindness based on some cells in the retina or partial blindness. For others this is not really a cure. If you want to cure people with progeria, does curing 20% of the cells really help? Perhaps 100% is not necessary, but it would seem strange to cure only some cells but not others. You'd have a mosaic of cells where some would work and others don't. Cells interact; timing also plays a role in development. I don't really see that aiming for anything but a very high number of cells cured, can work.
CRISPR is foremost a research tool. Calling it "extremely overhyped" without restricting it medical treatment seems disingenuous.
The CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool was developed in 2012, so I don't find it surprising that merely 14 years later, there's only one approved treatment. From discovery to approval, drug development often takes 10-15 years, and often much longer for novel techniques. So I'd say it too early to call it overhyped for treatments.
Finally, I think we'll see a lot of treatments that don't use CRISPR-Cas9, but related gene editing techniques, but it'll take another 10 to 20 years.
Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRNA_vaccine#History for how long another novel technique has been in development before it became really widespread with the mrna-based covid-19 vaccines.
The idea of using CRISPR/Cas to detect tumor-specific mutations that aren't necessarily oncogenic and then kill the cell is not a new one [0, 1, 2]. However, previous studies used Cas9, which just damages the DNA at the target site; this uses Cas12a2, which is far more destructive because it shreds the chromatin in the cell once activated by detecting the target sequence.
As with any cancer treatment, it's likely the tumor will evolve resistance. My guess is that cells will find ways to reject the lipid nanoparticles used to deliver the CRISPR/Cas mRNA and associated guide sequence(s), either via modifications to the cell surface (preventing LNP uptake) or via changes to endosomal/lysosomal pathways (causing the mRNA payload to get degraded before it has a chance to be translated into protein).
Depending on how the LNPs are designed, would resistance also potentially cripple the cancer cells? Like, it stops surfacing some cholesterol receptor because the drug is being delivered by LNPs that target that receptor, and now the cell is starved for cholesterol?
I've heard about drug resistance in bacteria leading to slower growth / reduced virulence. Maybe the same would occur with cancers. A drug that could effectively switch an aggressive cancer into a slow-growing one wouldn't be the worst thing.
>Depending on how the LNPs are designed, would resistance also potentially cripple the cancer cells?
Yes, if the LNP could be engineered to target an essential surface receptor, which is still a very tough problem. It would also not solve the issue of the payload successfully entering the cell but being subsequently degraded.
>I've heard about drug resistance in bacteria leading to slower growth / reduced virulence. Maybe the same would occur with cancers. A drug that could effectively switch an aggressive cancer into a slow-growing one wouldn't be the worst thing.
This is essentially how treatment for chronic lymphocytic leukemia happens. People with CLL can stay on BTK inhibitors for decades, often until they die of other natural causes.
But cancer isn't an organism. Cancer cells in any specific individual may evolve that way, but "human cancers" as a group will not. (The only way they could is by evolving human DNA, but "survival of the fittest" pushes the opposite direction for that.)
Indeed, there's no "be a better/stronger cancer and spread more effectively to more hosts" the way there is with bacteria or a virus. It's not like the flu where we need a new shot every winter because every winter is a new flu.
Once we solve the cancers we know about, they're solved forever, with the one caveat that more people will live longer, so that will increase the window for eventually still ending up dying to one of the cancers that resists this or that treatment. Which is a great deal of course, especially if it's a treatment that sounds way less destructive of QoL than chemo, radiation, etc.
>there's no "be a better/stronger cancer and spread more effectively to more hosts"
No, but there is "be a better/stronger cancer cell and don't succumb to whatever therapy is killing its neighboring cells." It's exactly akin to how dosing bacteria with antibiotics selects for individual cells that are resistant [0].
Nonetheless, we see the exact same resistance mechanisms to the same therapies recur across individuals, e.g. [0]. Convergent evolution is a harsh mistress.
There are some ideas about making it triggerable. So first you load the cells with a protein that is ready to start shredding but is inactive. Then you trigger it with a second compound.
This would shorten the timeframe for cells to mutate and acquire resistance mechanisms, but would not address the issue of cells with preexisting (epi)genetic resistance mechanisms that would then be promptly selected for.
I hope this finally works out. I remember almost exactly ten years ago I got excited about one of these proposed cancer cures, tried to talk about it at lunch with my coworkers, and they laughed at me for believing.
I'm pretty optimistic. I think it's a threshold question where we need a number of basic technologies to all get over certain bars before the floodgates start to open.
Over the past 1-2 decades there has been unbelievable progress at the basic technology level but most people are unimpressed because they haven't translated yet due to not individually being sufficient to cause an explosion of progress. IMO, we're starting to see it finally as so many different technologies have gotten so cheap, fast, and good.
So we're waiting for the Apple of the medical world to take a bunch of preexisting things to be applied together in a way that makes the whole much more valuable than the pieces. Or we need all of the individual lions to come together to make the Voltron?
Usually it takes about a decade for most medical inventions to work their way through medical bureaucracy[0], so I'd say that 10 years ago we were at the stage of watching Matthew Broderick war-dialling with an acoustic coupler and reading Usborne Books telling us that criminals of the future would work from home, and today we're in the exciting early days of dialup, AltaVista, and GeoCities[1].
[0] The covid vaccines collectively were faster only due to the fact that when money is no object you can parallelise a lot of options and can pipeline the testing stages rather than waiting for full review and another funding round before progressing to the next stage
[1] Where they-don't-tile-but-we-did-it-anyway animated gif backgrounds are the metaphor for home kits to make random things bioluminescent: https://www.the-odin.com/gfp-bacteria/
I'm not sure what this comment is trying to say. Theranos was a company build from the ground up on fraud. Apple, for all its faults, is provably at the forefront of technology used in personal computing devices.
The floodgates open = the market will see that at least some of that can actually work and make money => they will pour funding => new approaches built on that funding will start working, too?
Real in vivo genetic engineering isn't going away and will indeed be a powerful tool to face cancer. Any particular effort is doubtful because this is a journey measured in decades. It is not the same story as any one particular wonder drug fizzling out to nothing, it is a class of tools that is maturing into the realm of early therapeutic deployment.
> Much like other CRISPR therapies, delivery is a critical challenge, i.e., getting the large genome-cutting enzyme to all the targeted cells efficiently.
makes me think this is in vitro so far. So, years to decades away from being available for actual treatment in humans. Still good news.
Basically the issue is often that gene therapies end up in the liver since its the livers job to detoxify, but that may cause a dangerous immune response if the immune system notices it in the liver and attacks the organ, since the person could die from the damage.
I’m assuming this has been tried, but why doesn’t nano-encapsulated mRNA (that then makes the CRISPR sequences in cells) or whatever the peptide injectors do solve the problem?
You can target an individual by injecting that very individual with something lethal.
If that's not what you want, you'd need something like a virus to spread it. But then you have to ask yourself: what if that virus mutates? The specialization to certain gene markers is an evolutionary disadvantage, so evolution will tend to make it lose that restriction. Ooops.
Old concern, but it really doesn't work that way. Genetics don't respect human ideas like "nationalities" or "borders" - the targeting you can get by selecting on singular DNA variants is coarse enough to make ICBMs look like precision weapons.
Like many things of this nature, people keep bringing it up because it sounds Very Scary and Very Dystopian - not because it's worth giving an actual fuck about.
If it's year 2126, and you have this kind of tech floating around, and you aren't equipping the entire population with artificial immune systems capable of dealing with known and unknown biological threats? You've done something wrong.
Same problem with chemo and radiation. A tumor may start off with a single cancerous mutation, but by the time it spreads there may be several. Once the cell repair machinery has been broken, the cancer cells are prone for more mutations.
Chemo, radiation, and CRISPR will kill everything it can reach that is susceptible. That leaves everything that was unreachable or resistant behind to start growing again.
Kill cancer cells is easy. Killing ONLY cancer cells is very hard.
What economic / political model would cause the society to prioritize this over adtech? It seems so unsettling that brilliant human minds are trying hard, every day, to figure out how to make it impossible to bypass watching ads on YouTube, instead of helping cure cancer.
The bargaining dynamics are stacked against biology researchers at every stage of their career, from needing years and years of unrelated performance to be admitted to terribly expensive programs before they can begin to do experiments, to requiring costly equipment and resources to work, to needing to work with a small number of very powerful companies.
As a result, life science researchers are more price-taking than proce-setting when it comes to their wages / salary. If money is the motivator, then the market as-is isn’t addressing this one.
> would cause the society to prioritize this over adtech?
Private pharmaceutical R&D spending in the U.S. is around $100bn per year [1]. NIH spends another $50bn a year on biomedical research [2].
That eclipses total investments into adtech per se, which generously counted shouldn’t exceed $50 to 60bn. (And that only by counting like a third to a half of Google, Amazon, et cetera R&D and capital spending as adtech.) More precisely counted, it probably doesn’t exceed $10bn.
And when you can measure how effective those ads are in changing human behavior; it's easier for businesses to spend there. As an American, I would love it if pharmaceutical companies couldn't market to consumers. It would free up money for research or lower prices.
I don't think an economic model would work. Only a political one would work where the government would redirect a lot of funds towards this, making it a lucrative profession.
Adtech works because there is a lot of money in it. There is a lot of money in it because people seek quick entertainment, and we have a LOT of people driving the demand.
Now compare that to cancer research. There's no short term gratification about it.
There's a fair bit of frequency illusion involved here. A lot of brilliant human minds aren't, in fact, working on ad tech, and a lot of the people working on ad tech aren't, in fact, that brilliant (as evidenced by them working adversarially against their own fellow humans, for one).
There's a wide world outside big tech, Silicon Valley, and software in general. It only tends to be a bit less visible online.
>brilliant human minds are trying hard, every day, to figure out how to make it impossible to bypass watching ads on YouTube, instead of helping cure cancer.
And even more brilliant minds are defeating it, every day. I have doubts about how useful they would be in a research lab.
This is why I hate patents. If CRISPR were put behind a paywall, none of this would have happened. Everything having to be about profit is getting tiring.
> This is why I hate patents. If CRISPR were put behind a paywall, none of this would have happened. Everything having to be about profit is getting tiring.
CRISPR was the cause of a huge patent case and likely led to a change in US patent law because of the impracticability of deciding who did something first in the laboratory.
It continues to influence research as some nations took a while to decide how they would resolve their own researchers' CRISPR claims with respect to MIT/UC Berkeley.
And yet... all the research has continued apace.
Edit: the CRISPR patent cases are continuing even today
Over on reddit people were debating whether cancer should be cured since it disproportionately affects rich people and it made me realise how far reddit has fallen. It's just a botnet now to manipulate elections.
The flip side is that "fuck cancer" is a shibboleth there, to the point where a headline, "[Bad person] has contracted cancer" has every comment thread starting with "First, fuck cancer."
After we launched our startup, we had all sorts of folks reach out to sell their GTM services. I went with one group from Vietnam that would make engagement bait Reddit questions with some accounts, and advertise our product in the comments section with others. It was expensive but it worked
Do you think (or care) about the ethics of this sort of behavior? Do you consider it unethical and if you do, under what conditions would you decide to do it anyway?
Reddit is a huge danger to society. There's no doubt that subs about specific non political (and non popular) topics are hugely beneficial, the overall damage the echo chambers do still outweigh these benefits.
The way the voting system works at Reddit encourages group think and bubbles. All it takes is five more down votes than up votes and a comment or post essentially disappears from view. It's a design that actively avoids debate.
That's a huge misreading. Hiding comments in the UI empirically does not suppress discussion, if anything it actually attracts engagement. Lots of people are seeking the "wrong" to "correct" it.
Suppressed debate is almost universally due to biased/captured moderation teams aggressively using bans.
I'm certain that is not a mainsteam opinion on reddit, but by its nature you will be able to find arbitrarily stupid opinions in individual echo chambers
I would imagine the charitable characterization of that discussion is much closer to “awesome, this will mean the Peter Thiels and Elon Musks of the world will live to 150 while both me and my children will be dead long before this trickles down to regular people” vs. “we shouldn’t cure cancer”.
For the state of new cancer-killing drugs and bottlenecks getting them approved, see also the top few posts on https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/archive
The post on AI and and cures for cancer is https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/a-response-to-dario-amo... .
Here's their preprint from a month ago, in case you can't access the Nature paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.08.723607v1
Nature - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10738-7
CRISPR is an extremely overhyped approach which found a marketing engine via popular science. There is 1 FDA approved CRISPR therapy as compared to 7 for AAV and 7 for Lentivirus.
Counting all viral vector therapies that have been approved, we’re sitting at 19 approved therapies versus 1 for CRISPR.
I think CRISPR ideas in a lab are just an easy way into the mainstream press, but viral vector delivery is the real future. It just didn’t get the same news cycle, for whatever reason.
You're correct about CRISPR Cas9. The off-target affects are difficult to manage.
The paper describes Cas12a2. This is a different mechanism with discovery origins in - of all things - agriculture. It does not attempt in any way to reprogram cells. It uses a guide protein to locate a specific mutation with exacting precision and, when it activates, unleashes total destruction of the cell.
The implications of Cas12a2 on undruggable conditions that exhibit known driver mutation profiles is profound.
Source: I have personally funded novel research based on Cas12a2 for an undruggable condition I have. I have personally seen my condition "cured" in vitro using this technology and it left all of my WT cells unharmed. Some of the researchers I've funded are co-authors in the paper linked. I am a layperson in this field (I'm a SWE, not in biotech), but I am happy to answer questions.
This is wild, have you written about it publicly, or can you expand on it here?
Have you written about your experience anywhere? It would be interesting to see how you approached the research sector as a layperson. Are there any plans to move to in vivo? Best of luck with your research!
Seconding this comment. I would love to read a write-up about your experience and how you’ve been trying to work on solutions for yourself. Stories like these are valuable to the field and inspiring to other folks dealing with a tough diagnosis.
So how does Cas12a2 mitigate off-target effects?
If it were to work, gene therapy as-is would be possible. Which it is not, not even for those overpriced therapies. I have no doubt that sooner or later it will happen, as the problem space is finite, not infinite, but I simply don't see the correlation here.
> The implications of Cas12a2 on undruggable conditions that exhibit known driver mutation profiles is profound.
So what does this change exactly? Humans defined it as "undruggable conditions". You can reason this is an improvement, but I still see it in failure-territory. If it were to work, gene therapy would be an accurate - and affordable - technique. Which it is not right now.
> I am a layperson in this field (I'm a SWE, not in biotech), but I am happy to answer questions.
How does "answering questions" offset the technology being inferior right now?
I know nothing about this field, but I imagine the actual problem is how do you deliver the Cas12a2 protein to each individual cancer cell compare to a viral gene therapy?
There are two major problems, delivery is one of them. Collateral damage of mass cell destruction leading to systemic inflammation is the other.
The approach I'm reviewing now uses lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) for delivery. It isn't great for targeting my bone marrow condition but its workable. The team hasn't optimized it at all, either. There are also viral delivery mechanisms that I haven't studied yet.
The collateral damage problem is the backpressure on the delivery problem. If you get really good at delivery, you can destroy A LOT of cells very quickly. The human body (usually) responds to these events by releasing a lot of pro-inflammatory cytokines. This can lead to cytokine storms or worse.
As you "get good" at killing the target cells, the net effect can turn bad. It will probably be a balancing act.
Lipid nanoparticles are quite old as-is. How do you target cells specifically?
> If you get really good at delivery, you can destroy A LOT of cells very quickly.
You can destroy cells quickly. Ok. So the question is: how do you detect specifically only cancer cells via lipid nanoparticles? That was already a problem years ago with Herceptin. The rationale that is always used is that "we need to do something" for certain aggressive cancers. It has never been a super-effective technique, despite all the promo of how monoclonal antibodies are so accurate.
> As you "get good" at killing the target cells, the net effect can turn bad. It will probably be a balancing act.
That's already the status quo in the whole cancer field. I don't think that more than sloppy accuracy is acceptable for any gene therapy - and the off-target cleaving of CRISPR has always been the number #1 problem here.
> So the question is: how do you detect specifically only cancer cells via lipid nanoparticles?
You don't. Healthy cells will also get these nanoparticles, but without the triggering DNA sequence, the mRNA payload will remain inert and eventually will be degraded.
Naively, I would deal with this by deciding how many cells I want to kill each day and then figure out a dosing schedule that achieves that. Or maybe it's better to do one dose every few days. But yeah either way.
Devils advocate, I also vehemently shat on RNAi therapeutics a decade back. We do have RNAi therapies in market now though. I do think Crispr will find its place similarly.
Viral vector delivery is indeed harder to sell with PopSci, what with movies like "I am Legend".
Great first half of a movie, by the way. Up there with Sunshine for "Sit down for a great hour-long ambiance".
I usually end Legend after the mannequin trap, and end Sunshine after the transit of mercury.
CRIPSR was a game-changer for genetics research. A lot of gene knockout studies use CRISPR. However, it was always weirdly overhyped for clinical use from the beginning and this was obvious to anyone with a genetics background.
The public in general doesn't have a good understanding of basic genetics and I blame high school science curriculums for not covering it well enough. Too much time is wasted on Mendelian genetics without covering the Central Dogma.
You basically cannot "edit" your somatic DNA in a meaningful wholesale way since every single cell in your body has a copy of the DNA, and it's a foolish endeavor. What you can conceivably edit to good effect is your germline DNA, stem cell DNA, or modify mRNA expression (e.g. retinoids; yes putting retinol/adapalene cream on your face is "gene therapy"), or introduce foreign mRNA for your translation machinery to co-opt (e.g. mRNA vaccines).
I disagree that it's "gene therapy" to affect the natural regulation of mRNA production. If that were true then the term "gene therapy" loses its meaning, as just about everything changes the expression of mRNA. You can probably do so somewhere just by thinking really hard about it.
Expressing mRNA that doesn't exist in the genome, that would be gene therapy. Or just a virus.
Edit every cell? No. Edit enough cells to impact health outcomes for a meaningful period of time? [Yes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3FcbFqSoQY)
This approach can work for some genetic diseases such as blindness based on some cells in the retina or partial blindness. For others this is not really a cure. If you want to cure people with progeria, does curing 20% of the cells really help? Perhaps 100% is not necessary, but it would seem strange to cure only some cells but not others. You'd have a mosaic of cells where some would work and others don't. Cells interact; timing also plays a role in development. I don't really see that aiming for anything but a very high number of cells cured, can work.
CRISPR is foremost a research tool. Calling it "extremely overhyped" without restricting it medical treatment seems disingenuous.
The CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool was developed in 2012, so I don't find it surprising that merely 14 years later, there's only one approved treatment. From discovery to approval, drug development often takes 10-15 years, and often much longer for novel techniques. So I'd say it too early to call it overhyped for treatments.
Finally, I think we'll see a lot of treatments that don't use CRISPR-Cas9, but related gene editing techniques, but it'll take another 10 to 20 years.
Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRNA_vaccine#History for how long another novel technique has been in development before it became really widespread with the mrna-based covid-19 vaccines.
Why does it take 20 years? Except, of course, that it does not work nowhere near as well as it is being promoted - aka hyped.
mRNA vaccines are also quite different. Do they modify the DNA? Of course not. So that's already very different.
“Virus” - that’s why.
Bingo! CRISPR has an advantage of being relatively easy to describe to a layman, giving it a PR advantage.
So is the "idea" of microchips in vaccines. Should we just give up and let everything else have the PR advantage
The idea of using CRISPR/Cas to detect tumor-specific mutations that aren't necessarily oncogenic and then kill the cell is not a new one [0, 1, 2]. However, previous studies used Cas9, which just damages the DNA at the target site; this uses Cas12a2, which is far more destructive because it shreds the chromatin in the cell once activated by detecting the target sequence.
As with any cancer treatment, it's likely the tumor will evolve resistance. My guess is that cells will find ways to reject the lipid nanoparticles used to deliver the CRISPR/Cas mRNA and associated guide sequence(s), either via modifications to the cell surface (preventing LNP uptake) or via changes to endosomal/lysosomal pathways (causing the mRNA payload to get degraded before it has a chance to be translated into protein).
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28575452/
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-30205-2
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18875-x
Depending on how the LNPs are designed, would resistance also potentially cripple the cancer cells? Like, it stops surfacing some cholesterol receptor because the drug is being delivered by LNPs that target that receptor, and now the cell is starved for cholesterol?
I've heard about drug resistance in bacteria leading to slower growth / reduced virulence. Maybe the same would occur with cancers. A drug that could effectively switch an aggressive cancer into a slow-growing one wouldn't be the worst thing.
>Depending on how the LNPs are designed, would resistance also potentially cripple the cancer cells?
Yes, if the LNP could be engineered to target an essential surface receptor, which is still a very tough problem. It would also not solve the issue of the payload successfully entering the cell but being subsequently degraded.
>I've heard about drug resistance in bacteria leading to slower growth / reduced virulence. Maybe the same would occur with cancers. A drug that could effectively switch an aggressive cancer into a slow-growing one wouldn't be the worst thing.
This is essentially how treatment for chronic lymphocytic leukemia happens. People with CLL can stay on BTK inhibitors for decades, often until they die of other natural causes.
But cancer isn't an organism. Cancer cells in any specific individual may evolve that way, but "human cancers" as a group will not. (The only way they could is by evolving human DNA, but "survival of the fittest" pushes the opposite direction for that.)
Indeed, there's no "be a better/stronger cancer and spread more effectively to more hosts" the way there is with bacteria or a virus. It's not like the flu where we need a new shot every winter because every winter is a new flu.
Once we solve the cancers we know about, they're solved forever, with the one caveat that more people will live longer, so that will increase the window for eventually still ending up dying to one of the cancers that resists this or that treatment. Which is a great deal of course, especially if it's a treatment that sounds way less destructive of QoL than chemo, radiation, etc.
>there's no "be a better/stronger cancer and spread more effectively to more hosts"
No, but there is "be a better/stronger cancer cell and don't succumb to whatever therapy is killing its neighboring cells." It's exactly akin to how dosing bacteria with antibiotics selects for individual cells that are resistant [0].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8
> Indeed, there's no "be a better/stronger cancer and spread more effectively to more hosts" the way there is with bacteria or a virus.
The rare exception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonally_transmissible_cancer
Nonetheless, we see the exact same resistance mechanisms to the same therapies recur across individuals, e.g. [0]. Convergent evolution is a harsh mistress.
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2538882/
There are some ideas about making it triggerable. So first you load the cells with a protein that is ready to start shredding but is inactive. Then you trigger it with a second compound.
This would shorten the timeframe for cells to mutate and acquire resistance mechanisms, but would not address the issue of cells with preexisting (epi)genetic resistance mechanisms that would then be promptly selected for.
I hope this finally works out. I remember almost exactly ten years ago I got excited about one of these proposed cancer cures, tried to talk about it at lunch with my coworkers, and they laughed at me for believing.
I'm pretty optimistic. I think it's a threshold question where we need a number of basic technologies to all get over certain bars before the floodgates start to open.
Over the past 1-2 decades there has been unbelievable progress at the basic technology level but most people are unimpressed because they haven't translated yet due to not individually being sufficient to cause an explosion of progress. IMO, we're starting to see it finally as so many different technologies have gotten so cheap, fast, and good.
the public experiences biotechnology as decades of nothing, followed by years of everything once bottlenecks align
So we're waiting for the Apple of the medical world to take a bunch of preexisting things to be applied together in a way that makes the whole much more valuable than the pieces. Or we need all of the individual lions to come together to make the Voltron?
Usually it takes about a decade for most medical inventions to work their way through medical bureaucracy[0], so I'd say that 10 years ago we were at the stage of watching Matthew Broderick war-dialling with an acoustic coupler and reading Usborne Books telling us that criminals of the future would work from home, and today we're in the exciting early days of dialup, AltaVista, and GeoCities[1].
[0] The covid vaccines collectively were faster only due to the fact that when money is no object you can parallelise a lot of options and can pipeline the testing stages rather than waiting for full review and another funding round before progressing to the next stage
[1] Where they-don't-tile-but-we-did-it-anyway animated gif backgrounds are the metaphor for home kits to make random things bioluminescent: https://www.the-odin.com/gfp-bacteria/
We already had this. It was called Theranos.
I don't know if we "had" something called Theranos. In fact, I believe that was the subject of a couple of lawsuit because we didn't.
I'm not sure what this comment is trying to say. Theranos was a company build from the ground up on fraud. Apple, for all its faults, is provably at the forefront of technology used in personal computing devices.
Apple is first and foremost an affordable luxury brand that makes sleek hardware.
I think you've captured exactly what they are trying to say
The floodgates open = the market will see that at least some of that can actually work and make money => they will pour funding => new approaches built on that funding will start working, too?
Real in vivo genetic engineering isn't going away and will indeed be a powerful tool to face cancer. Any particular effort is doubtful because this is a journey measured in decades. It is not the same story as any one particular wonder drug fizzling out to nothing, it is a class of tools that is maturing into the realm of early therapeutic deployment.
The article is pretty light on details, but
> Much like other CRISPR therapies, delivery is a critical challenge, i.e., getting the large genome-cutting enzyme to all the targeted cells efficiently.
makes me think this is in vitro so far. So, years to decades away from being available for actual treatment in humans. Still good news.
Basically the issue is often that gene therapies end up in the liver since its the livers job to detoxify, but that may cause a dangerous immune response if the immune system notices it in the liver and attacks the organ, since the person could die from the damage.
I’m assuming this has been tried, but why doesn’t nano-encapsulated mRNA (that then makes the CRISPR sequences in cells) or whatever the peptide injectors do solve the problem?
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You can target an individual by injecting that very individual with something lethal.
If that's not what you want, you'd need something like a virus to spread it. But then you have to ask yourself: what if that virus mutates? The specialization to certain gene markers is an evolutionary disadvantage, so evolution will tend to make it lose that restriction. Ooops.
Old concern, but it really doesn't work that way. Genetics don't respect human ideas like "nationalities" or "borders" - the targeting you can get by selecting on singular DNA variants is coarse enough to make ICBMs look like precision weapons.
Like many things of this nature, people keep bringing it up because it sounds Very Scary and Very Dystopian - not because it's worth giving an actual fuck about.
I mean maybe not right now, but in 100-1000 years a complicated enough "nanobot/virus" could possibly be made to target a single person
If it's year 2126, and you have this kind of tech floating around, and you aren't equipping the entire population with artificial immune systems capable of dealing with known and unknown biological threats? You've done something wrong.
I suppose it could also be used to assassinate specific persons with the precision of DNA matching. Like FOXDIE.
Can anyone point to some resources about how cancers might adapt to CRISPR treatments?
Same problem with chemo and radiation. A tumor may start off with a single cancerous mutation, but by the time it spreads there may be several. Once the cell repair machinery has been broken, the cancer cells are prone for more mutations.
Chemo, radiation, and CRISPR will kill everything it can reach that is susceptible. That leaves everything that was unreachable or resistant behind to start growing again.
Kill cancer cells is easy. Killing ONLY cancer cells is very hard.
Cool. How can I help
What economic / political model would cause the society to prioritize this over adtech? It seems so unsettling that brilliant human minds are trying hard, every day, to figure out how to make it impossible to bypass watching ads on YouTube, instead of helping cure cancer.
The bargaining dynamics are stacked against biology researchers at every stage of their career, from needing years and years of unrelated performance to be admitted to terribly expensive programs before they can begin to do experiments, to requiring costly equipment and resources to work, to needing to work with a small number of very powerful companies.
As a result, life science researchers are more price-taking than proce-setting when it comes to their wages / salary. If money is the motivator, then the market as-is isn’t addressing this one.
The US government funds a lot of these programs, as they are obviously in the public interest. Until one man decided to stop it.
> would cause the society to prioritize this over adtech?
Private pharmaceutical R&D spending in the U.S. is around $100bn per year [1]. NIH spends another $50bn a year on biomedical research [2].
That eclipses total investments into adtech per se, which generously counted shouldn’t exceed $50 to 60bn. (And that only by counting like a third to a half of Google, Amazon, et cetera R&D and capital spending as adtech.) More precisely counted, it probably doesn’t exceed $10bn.
[1] https://phrma.org/blog/phrma-member-companies-rd-investments...
[2] https://www.science.org/content/article/final-nih-budget-202...
When you reframe ads as "control of human attention" it suddenly makes a lot more sense why so many resources are poured into them.
And when you can measure how effective those ads are in changing human behavior; it's easier for businesses to spend there. As an American, I would love it if pharmaceutical companies couldn't market to consumers. It would free up money for research or lower prices.
Humans are a bunch of hairless monkeys that have evolved to scam each other rather than hunt and gather food from Nature.
I don't think an economic model would work. Only a political one would work where the government would redirect a lot of funds towards this, making it a lucrative profession.
Adtech works because there is a lot of money in it. There is a lot of money in it because people seek quick entertainment, and we have a LOT of people driving the demand.
Now compare that to cancer research. There's no short term gratification about it.
There's a fair bit of frequency illusion involved here. A lot of brilliant human minds aren't, in fact, working on ad tech, and a lot of the people working on ad tech aren't, in fact, that brilliant (as evidenced by them working adversarially against their own fellow humans, for one).
There's a wide world outside big tech, Silicon Valley, and software in general. It only tends to be a bit less visible online.
>brilliant human minds are trying hard, every day, to figure out how to make it impossible to bypass watching ads on YouTube, instead of helping cure cancer.
And even more brilliant minds are defeating it, every day. I have doubts about how useful they would be in a research lab.
I remember seeing a comic strip about this exact argument but I can’t find it any more
This is why I hate patents. If CRISPR were put behind a paywall, none of this would have happened. Everything having to be about profit is getting tiring.
> This is why I hate patents. If CRISPR were put behind a paywall, none of this would have happened. Everything having to be about profit is getting tiring.
CRISPR was the cause of a huge patent case and likely led to a change in US patent law because of the impracticability of deciding who did something first in the laboratory.
It continues to influence research as some nations took a while to decide how they would resolve their own researchers' CRISPR claims with respect to MIT/UC Berkeley.
And yet... all the research has continued apace.
Edit: the CRISPR patent cases are continuing even today
https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/05/12/federal-appeals-court-s...
https://www.broadinstitute.org/crispr/journalists-statement-...
Jennifer Doudna again. What an amazing scientist. Wow.
Over on reddit people were debating whether cancer should be cured since it disproportionately affects rich people and it made me realise how far reddit has fallen. It's just a botnet now to manipulate elections.
The flip side is that "fuck cancer" is a shibboleth there, to the point where a headline, "[Bad person] has contracted cancer" has every comment thread starting with "First, fuck cancer."
After we launched our startup, we had all sorts of folks reach out to sell their GTM services. I went with one group from Vietnam that would make engagement bait Reddit questions with some accounts, and advertise our product in the comments section with others. It was expensive but it worked
Do you think (or care) about the ethics of this sort of behavior? Do you consider it unethical and if you do, under what conditions would you decide to do it anyway?
Reddit is a huge danger to society. There's no doubt that subs about specific non political (and non popular) topics are hugely beneficial, the overall damage the echo chambers do still outweigh these benefits.
The way the voting system works at Reddit encourages group think and bubbles. All it takes is five more down votes than up votes and a comment or post essentially disappears from view. It's a design that actively avoids debate.
That's a huge misreading. Hiding comments in the UI empirically does not suppress discussion, if anything it actually attracts engagement. Lots of people are seeking the "wrong" to "correct" it.
Suppressed debate is almost universally due to biased/captured moderation teams aggressively using bans.
Well, now that it's becoming "the community source" for LLMs it's becoming even more of a target for large-scale manipulation.
I'm certain that is not a mainsteam opinion on reddit, but by its nature you will be able to find arbitrarily stupid opinions in individual echo chambers
I am not so certain
Just spend 15 minutes in /b/ and everything else will feel better.
I would imagine the charitable characterization of that discussion is much closer to “awesome, this will mean the Peter Thiels and Elon Musks of the world will live to 150 while both me and my children will be dead long before this trickles down to regular people” vs. “we shouldn’t cure cancer”.
>reddit
>children
stepchildren, perhaps.