we are in the middle of a genetic
revolution one which will change
everything one which could mean that all
genetic illness and disease could be not
just treated but affordably cured do you
know what the number one cause of
genetic illnesses its reproduction when
we mate we mutate I’m not very romantic
in the 1700s farmers tried to take the
guesswork out of this gamble by
selective breeding this is the beginning
of the Agricultural Revolution they
realized that if you cross large male
pig with large female pig you would get
a lot more meat for your mate in this
simple genetic formula of meat squared
changed everything it was simple and
this was before they knew about DNA what
do we know about DNA and more
importantly what have we left to find
out
DNA is the Lego of our legacy with just
a few simple pieces we can make very
complex beings and if you think of DNA
as an alphabet then our genomes are the
language and our genes the words only
this alphabet only consists of four
letters a T G and C now it’s not
surprising that this language is complex
what is surprising is that in the 14
years since the human genome was
sequenced much of this language has yet
to be deciphered
and that’s because genes like words have
more than one meaning mutations are like
spelling mistakes sometimes a spelling
mistake can make very little difference
to the meaning of the word other times
it can be catastrophic I’ll give you
some examples here is a present thank
you if we swap the e for the a we get a
very different gift hair is a present
now it’s not always the change of one
letter which makes the difference you
can have deletions and you can also have
insertions of letters into the
completely wrong place here is a
president but we can learn from
mutations and previously this was our
only way of studying disease when a
mutation occurs in the same people with
the same illness and we see the same
spelling mistake in each of their DNA we
can find a cause for that disease but
what about finding a cure previously
we’ve relied on looking at these
patterns in people to find the cure we
never really knew what we were going to
expect until we actually waited for that
to happen now in the 70s scientists
learned that if you could put one piece
of DNA from one organism into another
this was met with both curiosity for the
type of people who cared and concern and
maybe the concern was justified was but
so too was the potential for progress
and in 1974 the world’s for
genetically altered mouse was made this
revolutionized our way of treating
studying and learning about disease in a
way that we could never do it before him
in the 1980s the first patent was given
for a microbe which could eat oil this
was used to clear up oil spills all over
the world probably the best use of this
genetic technology was in our health
care treatments and many of the
treatments that we take for granted
today are produced by means of
engineered life such as blood clotting
factors for people with hemophilia
growth hormones for people with
pituitary disorders and even insulin can
be created completely in the lab without
the need for animal organs it can be
grown in bacteria which work as many
production factories bacteria are not as
clever very useful after this we
realized that we must learn more and
after this we began the genetic
revolution so genetic engineering was
born when we were able to put pieces of
DNA from one into organism into the next
and the current technologies that we use
rely on curing by compensation such as
giving that insulin to patients with
diabetic
with diabetes who cannot produce it
themselves or we cure by concealing such
as giving pain medication to temporarily
alleviate pain but what about curing by
correction nowadays we can use methods
to harvest the tools that we already
have and use these to better further our
understanding of disease in fact most of
the drugs that we use nowadays are
manufactured with the idea that
everyone’s genetics is the same they
take no accountability for the fact that
there are genetic differences between
ethnicities and people and certainly
males and females many drug trials that
we use at the moment were all tested on
Caucasian males aged between 18 and 40
even preclinical drug trials are carried
out on male mice to avoid the Easter
cycle and the hormonal fluctuations in a
female Mouse that means that true
pharmacological interactions are not
really being accounted for in sometimes
over 50% of the population that’s a lot
of pointless prescribing well what if
your prescription was personal tailored
to your genetics in fact bacteria do
have a mechanism of tailoring their
genetics and it’s called their immunity
why not make our prescriptions
personalized
to each of our genomes after all cost of
genetic sequencing has fallen the
ability to read every single letter in
the book that is U has gone from over a
million ten years ago to under a
thousand now and is constantly falling
so what about these bacteria who can
edit their own genome well how how they
work is to use it as an immune system so
we all recognize that we have an immune
system which is which we need to fight
off bacteria bacteria to need an immune
system and how this works is to
recognize invading bacteria cut it up
and insert it into their own pretty
useful CRISPR is the immune system of
bacteria and its acronym
explains how it works it stands for
clustered regularly interspaced short
palindromic repeats okay it doesn’t
explain it what it does do is it refers
to the genetic sequence of bacteria and
in these bacteria there were pieces of
DNA which puzzled scientists because
they didn’t belong to that bacteria they
soon discovered that these in between
pieces of DNA belonged to other bacteria
and other viruses and what they realized
what these were the chopped-up remains
of viruses and bacteria that had
previously tried to infect that bacteria
essentially every interspaced piece
served as a genetic timeline for every
infection that that bacteria had fought
and won and it’s this fight that’s of
interest to us if we can use this clever
immune system to locate a piece of DNA
recognize it cut it and insert it into
our own and uses are endless
now the discovery of CRISPR was far from
overnight but its global uptake and
application worm and it’s easy to see
why CRISPR is like the smartphone of
science if we can use this in the same
way as smartphones by updating our
technology we can maybe look to cure
some diseases many genetic diseases
cannot be cured so you might ask why
should I care about CRISPR what does it
matter well for the majority of genetic
disorders and cancers and diseases there
is no cure there’s only care many of
even if we take single gene disorders
these are the disorders which are caused
due to a mutation in a single gene these
are the ones which are most likely to be
used for this technology or treated
there are between five and eight
thousand monogenic or single gene
disorders and it’s thought that together
they will affect 6% of the population at
any time in their lives so even if we
take this so-called rare form of genetic
disorders these will affect a lot of
people if we could begin to understand
and begin to treat monogenic disorders
are only a small example of the
disorders which could be treated how it
could work is in two ways one is to
treat the person who’s already sick the
other is to prevent the illness in the
first place now in the first put very
simply we could take cells from a person
alter them and fix them and put them
back in that person
doing this is not new gene therapy has
been attempting to do this for over 30
years and in fact older mechanisms are
currently being used the first clinical
trial has begun for treating up type of
blood cancer leukemia how it works is to
take patients cells
process them in the lab and about two
weeks later at a cost of 10,000 pounds
those cells are put back in that patient
and the results are very promising but
these cells can only be used for that
patient CRISPR could change that using
CRISPR we could take these cells
genetically modify them and they could
be used for hundreds of patients at a
fraction of the cost on time but just
like a smartphone CRISPR is constantly
updating in the last year alone we’ve
found more uses we have refined its
applicability and made it more precise
by sequencing the bacterial genomes of
many other bacteria before ethics is a
big problem when it comes to this but we
need to improve our technology in order
to understand the repercussions and
maybe there could be none maybe they
could be only good our understanding of
genetics is getting better the ability
to sequence is falling and the ability
to edit has arrived I’m not here to
discuss the limitations because not
everyone wants to be better faster
CRISPR is stronger but I want to do is
put it in context with some of the
therapies that we already know and maybe
say that what we have is not necessarily
good enough and move you beyond caution
to curiosity I don’t want to ask you if
you’re for or against it but not
necessarily for and certainly not
against it because if healthcare was
like technology and had regular updates
would you click ignore or accept
download I would accept
you
revolution one which will change
everything one which could mean that all
genetic illness and disease could be not
just treated but affordably cured do you
know what the number one cause of
genetic illnesses its reproduction when
we mate we mutate I’m not very romantic
in the 1700s farmers tried to take the
guesswork out of this gamble by
selective breeding this is the beginning
of the Agricultural Revolution they
realized that if you cross large male
pig with large female pig you would get
a lot more meat for your mate in this
simple genetic formula of meat squared
changed everything it was simple and
this was before they knew about DNA what
do we know about DNA and more
importantly what have we left to find
out
DNA is the Lego of our legacy with just
a few simple pieces we can make very
complex beings and if you think of DNA
as an alphabet then our genomes are the
language and our genes the words only
this alphabet only consists of four
letters a T G and C now it’s not
surprising that this language is complex
what is surprising is that in the 14
years since the human genome was
sequenced much of this language has yet
to be deciphered
and that’s because genes like words have
more than one meaning mutations are like
spelling mistakes sometimes a spelling
mistake can make very little difference
to the meaning of the word other times
it can be catastrophic I’ll give you
some examples here is a present thank
you if we swap the e for the a we get a
very different gift hair is a present
now it’s not always the change of one
letter which makes the difference you
can have deletions and you can also have
insertions of letters into the
completely wrong place here is a
president but we can learn from
mutations and previously this was our
only way of studying disease when a
mutation occurs in the same people with
the same illness and we see the same
spelling mistake in each of their DNA we
can find a cause for that disease but
what about finding a cure previously
we’ve relied on looking at these
patterns in people to find the cure we
never really knew what we were going to
expect until we actually waited for that
to happen now in the 70s scientists
learned that if you could put one piece
of DNA from one organism into another
this was met with both curiosity for the
type of people who cared and concern and
maybe the concern was justified was but
so too was the potential for progress
and in 1974 the world’s for
genetically altered mouse was made this
revolutionized our way of treating
studying and learning about disease in a
way that we could never do it before him
in the 1980s the first patent was given
for a microbe which could eat oil this
was used to clear up oil spills all over
the world probably the best use of this
genetic technology was in our health
care treatments and many of the
treatments that we take for granted
today are produced by means of
engineered life such as blood clotting
factors for people with hemophilia
growth hormones for people with
pituitary disorders and even insulin can
be created completely in the lab without
the need for animal organs it can be
grown in bacteria which work as many
production factories bacteria are not as
clever very useful after this we
realized that we must learn more and
after this we began the genetic
revolution so genetic engineering was
born when we were able to put pieces of
DNA from one into organism into the next
and the current technologies that we use
rely on curing by compensation such as
giving that insulin to patients with
diabetic
with diabetes who cannot produce it
themselves or we cure by concealing such
as giving pain medication to temporarily
alleviate pain but what about curing by
correction nowadays we can use methods
to harvest the tools that we already
have and use these to better further our
understanding of disease in fact most of
the drugs that we use nowadays are
manufactured with the idea that
everyone’s genetics is the same they
take no accountability for the fact that
there are genetic differences between
ethnicities and people and certainly
males and females many drug trials that
we use at the moment were all tested on
Caucasian males aged between 18 and 40
even preclinical drug trials are carried
out on male mice to avoid the Easter
cycle and the hormonal fluctuations in a
female Mouse that means that true
pharmacological interactions are not
really being accounted for in sometimes
over 50% of the population that’s a lot
of pointless prescribing well what if
your prescription was personal tailored
to your genetics in fact bacteria do
have a mechanism of tailoring their
genetics and it’s called their immunity
why not make our prescriptions
personalized
to each of our genomes after all cost of
genetic sequencing has fallen the
ability to read every single letter in
the book that is U has gone from over a
million ten years ago to under a
thousand now and is constantly falling
so what about these bacteria who can
edit their own genome well how how they
work is to use it as an immune system so
we all recognize that we have an immune
system which is which we need to fight
off bacteria bacteria to need an immune
system and how this works is to
recognize invading bacteria cut it up
and insert it into their own pretty
useful CRISPR is the immune system of
bacteria and its acronym
explains how it works it stands for
clustered regularly interspaced short
palindromic repeats okay it doesn’t
explain it what it does do is it refers
to the genetic sequence of bacteria and
in these bacteria there were pieces of
DNA which puzzled scientists because
they didn’t belong to that bacteria they
soon discovered that these in between
pieces of DNA belonged to other bacteria
and other viruses and what they realized
what these were the chopped-up remains
of viruses and bacteria that had
previously tried to infect that bacteria
essentially every interspaced piece
served as a genetic timeline for every
infection that that bacteria had fought
and won and it’s this fight that’s of
interest to us if we can use this clever
immune system to locate a piece of DNA
recognize it cut it and insert it into
our own and uses are endless
now the discovery of CRISPR was far from
overnight but its global uptake and
application worm and it’s easy to see
why CRISPR is like the smartphone of
science if we can use this in the same
way as smartphones by updating our
technology we can maybe look to cure
some diseases many genetic diseases
cannot be cured so you might ask why
should I care about CRISPR what does it
matter well for the majority of genetic
disorders and cancers and diseases there
is no cure there’s only care many of
even if we take single gene disorders
these are the disorders which are caused
due to a mutation in a single gene these
are the ones which are most likely to be
used for this technology or treated
there are between five and eight
thousand monogenic or single gene
disorders and it’s thought that together
they will affect 6% of the population at
any time in their lives so even if we
take this so-called rare form of genetic
disorders these will affect a lot of
people if we could begin to understand
and begin to treat monogenic disorders
are only a small example of the
disorders which could be treated how it
could work is in two ways one is to
treat the person who’s already sick the
other is to prevent the illness in the
first place now in the first put very
simply we could take cells from a person
alter them and fix them and put them
back in that person
doing this is not new gene therapy has
been attempting to do this for over 30
years and in fact older mechanisms are
currently being used the first clinical
trial has begun for treating up type of
blood cancer leukemia how it works is to
take patients cells
process them in the lab and about two
weeks later at a cost of 10,000 pounds
those cells are put back in that patient
and the results are very promising but
these cells can only be used for that
patient CRISPR could change that using
CRISPR we could take these cells
genetically modify them and they could
be used for hundreds of patients at a
fraction of the cost on time but just
like a smartphone CRISPR is constantly
updating in the last year alone we’ve
found more uses we have refined its
applicability and made it more precise
by sequencing the bacterial genomes of
many other bacteria before ethics is a
big problem when it comes to this but we
need to improve our technology in order
to understand the repercussions and
maybe there could be none maybe they
could be only good our understanding of
genetics is getting better the ability
to sequence is falling and the ability
to edit has arrived I’m not here to
discuss the limitations because not
everyone wants to be better faster
CRISPR is stronger but I want to do is
put it in context with some of the
therapies that we already know and maybe
say that what we have is not necessarily
good enough and move you beyond caution
to curiosity I don’t want to ask you if
you’re for or against it but not
necessarily for and certainly not
against it because if healthcare was
like technology and had regular updates
would you click ignore or accept
download I would accept
you
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