Fyodor Urnov explains how retuning genes can restore health harmony.
Urnov is the scientific director at Innovative Genomics Institute, a professor at the Molecular and Cell Biology Department of UC Berkeley, and co-founder of Tune Therapeuticsfter a lifetime in the field of epigenetics, and nearly 20 years after my colleagues and I coined the term “genome editing,” I will be the first to admit that describing the “genome”—a marvelous biological process that guides what our genes do—takes a bit of explaining.
If you’ve ever heard a beginning violinist working through a simple piece, you’ll know it's sonically grating. We hear the lack of harmony, and it's painful.lack of harmony? It could simply be the wrong note played at the wrong time. But it can also arise from a failure of coordination. Any time you have more than one instrument on stage, if they're not coherent , it just hurts.
Armed with this knowledge—and empowered by the development of CRISPR-based proteins that can edit both genome and epigenome—scientists across academia and industry have been racing toward the goal of aThe basic idea is this: if discord of gene expression leads to disease, could we not simply re-tune this orchestra of gene output to restore harmony in health?.
Besides the potential benefit of reversibility, gene tuning also offers control over duration of effect. For example, a remarkable new wave of cancer treatments has emerged recently from work by physicians and scientists at the University of Pennsylvania in which the patient’s own immune system cells are reprogrammed to attack a blood cancer.
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