Saturday, October 29, 2016

Clinical Trial of New Gene Editing Technology


Lu Yong, an oncologist, and his team are going to launch new method to treat patients with lung cancer. Their plan is to carry out clinical trials of injecting patients to modify their cells with CRSIPR-Cas9 during clinical trials. This would be a great new method to use since there are many patients who experience chemotherapy in vain because the treatment is ineffective. The team of oncologist plan to execute the new procedure by first extracting T cells from the patient and then use the CRSIPR-Cas9 technology. The CRSIPS-Cas9 technology is used by snipping chromosomes which gets rid of genes at a specific point. This in turn allows the body to begin to produce cells that help the immune system of patients. Once this is done the cells are then replicated in a laboratory. Although CRSIPR-Cas9 is known to be harmful if the wrong genes are taken away from the chromosome the team of oncologist will reassure themselves that the procedure went expected before placing the gene edited cells in the patients. CRSIPR-Cas9 is a cheap, quick and easy way to do gene editing in the laboratory. However, there has been cases when the ethics of this method were questioned. For example, the genes of an embryo were used but when it was placed back in the embryo it did not survive. Questions were raised whether or not this method could throw off whole ecosystems. This method regardless of certain flaws gives scientist the power to change human genomes and cure diseases.
Although, there are possible risk with the CRSIP-Cas9 method there is even a greater risk if patients are not given more options to help combat cancer. If chemotherapy is not working then it would best to try anything else that could possibly work to save a person’s life. Medicine is about practice to determine what new innovative ways physicians can save someone’s life.



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