If you read frequently about technology and all the news that are being presented, surely in a publication you will have heard something about CRISPR a technology called to revolutionize the world thanks to the fact that, broadly speaking, it gives the human being that freedom that we have been looking for for decades, something as simple as being able to cut and modify DNA chains at our whim, with all that that implies.
In this post I just want us to meet today to talk about this very novel topic, a technology that has been discovered by a young man from Alicante and that, according to experts in the field, has just opened nothing less than a new market valued at about 46.000 millions of dollars. Perhaps because of this, it is not surprising that the largest companies related to the world of medicine have become so involved far from that, as its discoverer has commented on occasion, CRISPR gives us hope for a much better world.
CRISPR, history of a technology discovered in Spain
When talking about CRISPR we inevitably have to refer to its discoverer, Francis Mojica, a researcher who was born in a town very close to the city of Elche who began to work on this topic during the development of his doctoral thesis on the recommendation of his tutor back in 1989.
At this point in his life, a young Francis Mojica began to study a small bacteria with extreme tolerance to salt that they had found in the salt flats, specifically the Haloferx mediterranei. Already in 1993 published his first conclusions where we find some very important references to his final work since literally the Mojica had 'found some repeating sequences in its genome that should fulfill an important function for the cell but I never imagined something so great'.
At this point, many scientists claim that there are already works prior to this where the presence of these sequences was discovered, although the truth, as has been shown, is that Francis Mojica was the first to identify, experiment with, and even name them. Unfortunately, and despite the fact that these sequences were known to exist, a way to name them had not been found.
We have to jump now to the year 2000 to find ourselves before a Francis Mojica who worked only in the development of CRISPR. During this and subsequent years, the researcher discovered that there were many microorganisms that, if modified, died. At this point the researcher decided to call these microorganisms as'Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindormic Repeats'or CRISPR which in Spanish would be something as simple as'clustered and regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats', a description of what these microorganisms really were.
At this time the technology already had a name although, it still took a long time for Francis Mojica, already in the summer of 2003, could identify parts of vuris in the spaces of the repetitions that, curiously, functioned as immune system. From this moment on, many of the great laboratories set their eyes on this technology and began to work on the mass.
Nothing less than ten years later, already in 2012, is when Charpentier and Doudna are able to identify the minimum elements with which CRISPR could be used to cutting and modifying DNA strands. In this way, to this day, CRISPR is considered the greatest advance in genetic engineering in all of history.
What is CRISPR?
Personally, I must admit that I did not want to talk about CRISPR without mentioning the whole story behind its discovery and how Francis Mojica is considered a 'hero', in the words of Eric lander, of which practically no one talks about but who, during their hard work alone, have made this genetic revolution possible.
Returning to the subject that brings us together, tell you that according to the experts CRISPR is just a kind of immune system that prokaryotic cells have. Basically what this system does is, when detecting a threat from any virus, these cells can modify their own genetic material in order to become immune to this type of attack.
This is roughly what CRISPR would be, the description of how these prokaryotic cells manage to defend themselves against these 'invaders'. Once science has known how to work in this way, the human being has been able to do things that we could never have imagined since, according to the most used examples, using an RNA sequence as a guide, we can immunize microorganisms important for commercial use, make genetic modifications in people to eliminate the worst diseases they may suffer and even recover extinct animal species.
Where does this take us?
After the discoveries of Doudna and Charpentier, it has been possible to demonstrate, by the laboratories of the Broad Institute of MIT in this case, that the use of CRISPR is viable in every living thing larger than a cell. After this, a series of legal battles have begun around the world that must be resolved since, a methodology that until now was considered the most effective, economical and precise found up to now, could become the heritage of a few.
Personally, I have to confess that I have read a lot about this technology, many things I have understood thanks to people who know how to explain things very well and others, well base of documentation and even in some details I am quite lost, what I do not understand is how There are people who, faced with the possibility of eradicating all kinds of genetic diseases and even improving our capacities as humans, still consider fight to see who gets the patent on all this and restricts its use to the hefty payment of being able to use it.
Problems that can be caused by the misuse of the CRISPR
Like all new technology, the truth is that the use of CRISPR can cause many problems that, at the moment, we do not know. Among those discovered at a theoretical level, as it has been published in several magazines of international importance, apparently we find one as logical as it is resounding, playing God can lead to hundreds of unwanted mutations being introduced into modified genetic material.
Whenever any type of article of this type is published, as is logical, it carries an important investigation behind it and on this occasion those responsible are a group of scientists formed by members of Columbia University, the University of Iowa and the University of Stanford those who have worked with mice to, through CRISPR, try 'heal them' the blindness.
Apparently and during his work, even though CRISPR is a tremendously accurate tool, the researchers found mutations elsewhere in the genome, something that was not expected and hence the surprise has jumped. Specifically, as it has been officially published, we speak of more than 1.500 small mutations and hundreds of insertions and unexpected deletions of genetic material.
Even so, scientists have not discarded this technique of genetic modification, but the true fault of all this is, according to themselves, what little that we know how to work with this new technology. As for the mice, despite all these small mutations having been discovered, the truth is that they are all healthy according to known veterinary criteria, that is, at the moment the mutations have not created any kind of problem in the animals.