geneedited

Slayman received his first kidney transplant in 2018 from a human donor. The donor kidney initially functioned well, but Slayman started to go into kidney failure after years of living with diabetes. Diabetes is the leading cause of kidney disease, which can eventually result in kidney failure.He had no choice but to go on dialysis, a treatment that removes excess fluid and waste from a person’s blood. But the dialysis caused complications—his blood vessels were clotting and failing. Slayman wound up in the hospital…

Reports from New Scientist suggest gene-edited meat could make an appearance at your local supermarket soon. The report says that a company called Genus is preparing the commercial launch of a batch of gene-edited pigs that have been modified to be immune to disease.If the launch is approved, we could see genetically modified pork on store shelves in the next couple of years. So far, Genus has created hundreds of CRISPR-edited pigs. The goal here is to provide farms with a way to keep diseases in check without…

Just a few miles away in Limpopo, white families lived in big, attractive houses, with easy access to all these things. The older Sefala became, the more she peppered her father with questions about the visible racial segregation of their neighborhood: “Why is it like this?” Now, at 28, she is helping do something about it. Alongside computer scientists Nyalleng Moorosi and Timnit Gebru at the nonprofit Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), which Gebru set up in 2021, she is deploying computer vision tools and…

This time the experiment lasted only 72 hours, as that’s about how long a pig liver would be needed to support a real patient. Hasz says other families might be comfortable with longer experiments, but probably not anything indefinite: “We can maintain a body with mechanical support once they are declared medically and legally dead, but families have a desire for closure, funeral services, and depending on the family, they may limit it to one day or one month.” Hasz says his team will be looking for more body donors to…

“There is always curiosity. Everyone takes a meeting,” says Curtis. “They do view it as the future, but is it next year, or 100 years from now?” “With a heart transplant, you are really swinging for the fence,” he says. “Whereas with extracorporeal, it’s a little more like how products usually get developed. You can try for steady improvements.” This is the first time an organ from one of the eGenesis pigs has been tried with a human, but Curtis says eGenesis is ready to apply for permission to start a formal trial of…

That has led researchers to genetically alter pigs in an attempt to make their organs a better match. The biotech company that bred the pig for the Penn study, eGenesis of Cambridge, Massaschetts, is aiming to do that with gene editing. Scientists at the company used Crispr to make a total of 69 genetic edits to the animal. These included knocking out three pig genes to prevent immediate immune rejection and inserting seven human genes involved in inflammation, immunity, and blood clotting. The remaining edits disabled…

While the startup cofounders considered hoppy-tasting but hop-free beer potentially beneficial to brewers and the environment—as Denby said in a New York Times story after the paper was published—some hop farmers felt threatened. They feared engineered yeast could end a farming tradition and hollow out the soul of brewing, a dance of microorganisms, farmers, brewers, and hops stretching back to the 11th century.Denby declines to talk on the record about the antagonism, which caught the company by surprise, but news of the…

Microbes are everywhere, and the ones in our bodies appear to be incredibly important for our health. They’ve developed intricate relationships with other living systems, feeding on chemicals in their environments to produce other chemicals—some of which are more beneficial to nearby organisms than others. Getting microbes to work for us has been a tantalizing prospect to scientists for decades. Can we tweak the genomes of these microbes to control exactly which chemicals they break down or produce, for example? What if…

The question is: can we tweak the genomes of these microbes to control exactly which chemicals they break down or produce? Imagine the possibilities. What if we could get microbes to help us reduce pollution? What if we could create microbes that make medicines, or that churn out gut-friendly products in our intestines? Modified microbes seem to help treat cancer in mice, and human trials are on the way, as I reported earlier this year. (For a more general update on gene editing, you can read about how the editing tool…

When the CRISPR gene editor landed in U.S. plant science labs a decade ago, allowing researchers to tweak a crop’s own DNA instead of pasting in foreign genes, hopes rose that it would pave the way for looser regulation of genetically modified crops. Last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) gave plant scientists much of their wish, exempting certain gene-edited changes to plants. But the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is taking a tougher…