U.K. Approves First Studies of New Gene Editing Technique CRISPR on Human Embryos

The new technique offers hope for victims of genetic condition and infertility but also raises major ethical issues

Alice Park @aliceparkny-Feb 1, 2016

A U.K. researcher will be the first to use a precise but controversial new gene-editing technology called CRISPR to alter the genes in a human embryo.

In a nondescript office in London, a small group of experts and patient advocates have made a momentous decision that could forever change the human condition.

The U.K.’s Human Fertilization and Embryo Authority (HFEA) decided to approve a researcher’s request to use CRISPR to permanently change DNA in a human embryo.

It’s the first time the technology, which has taken the medical world by storm, has been sanctioned for use on human embryos. The team of scientists led by Kathy Niakan, a biologist at Francis Crick Institute, will attempt to edit out bits of DNA that prevent an embryo from developing properly—which may answer important questions about infertility. The embryo would not be allowed to survive beyond 14 days—meaning they wouldn’t be implanted into a woman’s womb and grown into live babies.

“I promise you she has no intention of the embryos ever being put back into a woman for development,” Robin Lovell-Badge, group leader at the Crick Institute, told TIME. “That wouldn’t be the point. The point is to understand things about basic human biology. We know lots about how the early mouse embryo develops in terms of how various cell lineages give rise to the embryo or to [other] tissue that make up the placenta. But we know very little about how this happens in the human embryo.”

Still, the experiment raises serious questions about how the powerful technique should be used. CRISPR opens the door to an unprecedented level of control over the human genome. Older techniques for editing DNA have been blunt and unreliable at best; CRISPR, on the other hand, is quickly emerging as the precision blade to those butter-knife approaches.

CRISPR allows scientists to precisely snip out and replace genes, and for the first time, the newly green-lit experiment will apply this to the so-called germline cells in an embryo—the DNA in an embryo so early in its development that all of its resulting cells will carry the change—and pass it on to the next generation. Monday’s decision has been eagerly anticipated by scientists around the world.

In the United States, federal laws prohibit the National Institutes of Health from funding human-embryo-based research that uses CRISPR, and leading scientists have called for a moratorium on the use of the technology on human embryos.               Full Story>>>