Genetic engineering of human embryos will be safe and effective within two years

Safe editing of human embryos may be possible in as little as one or two years, and the head of China's leading genetic research program says that international rules are currently needed to prevent this technology from being used as a weapon of mass destruction.

Professor Yang Hui said that his group made a breakthrough by tripling the effectiveness of a new genetic engineering tool that can change the genes of human embryos with unprecedented accuracy and security.

Once technology is recognized as safe, scientists expect it to be approved for clinical trials and treatment of people in the countries in which this research is being conducted.

Yang, a researcher at the Shanghai Institute of Biological Sciences, which is part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the tool would soon be ready for clinical use, which would pave the way for the legal appearance of modified children in a year or two.

“Technology is like a weapon or drugs. Immoral use, such as creating a superman, must be banned forever, ”said Yang.

Yang and his colleagues used a variant of CRISPR, known as base editing, to change a group of human embryos that had a mutation causing birth defects.
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They found that the mutation disappeared in 80% of embryos, according to an article published in the journal Genome Biology .

In past experiments, the success rate was less than 30%, but although the increase in efficiency was significant, the group was not satisfied with the result.

“Even if only one unmodified embryo remains, it creates an ethical problem. To use technology in humans, almost 100% efficiency is needed, ”said Yang.

Chinese researchers have achieved a high level of success, refuting the generally accepted position that it is necessary to edit genes when the embryo is still composed of zygotes, and the editor of the bases was introduced after the embryos were divided into two cells using paired needles.



Yang said the secret of their success lies in the timing of the injection. He also said that the group is close to solving ethical issues and other problems, such as incorrect targeting and incorrect gene changes.

“The technology of editing bases with a high standard of safety should be ready for clinical use in one or two years ... we are ahead of competitors from the United States,” he said.

The base editing technique is an improvement to the method used by Chinese scientist Dr. Hee Jiankui, who last year generated global criticism for creating the world's first genetically modified twin girls, known as Lulu and Nana, who were born in Shenzhen last year.

He used CRISPR-Cas9, a popular gene editing tool that is insecure when applied directly to human genes, because it cuts DNA strands and then relies on the cell to take care of the repair of the incision.

Various diseases can occur if the repair mechanisms of the cell miss the cut thread.

Editing of bases works by changing the nucleotide or “letter” in the genome, which is considered much safer than the classical technology.

According to him, CRISPR still generates too many undesirable mutations and is ineffective when used on human cells, but both China and the United States are racing to solve these problems.

According to him, the trade war added fuel to the fire of competition, since genetic engineering was among the technologies banned for export to China.

“Investing in the United States in the technology of genetic engineering is more than 10 times more than in China,” said Yang, but Chinese scientists are not giving up the fight.

“We are working with the same attitude as the authors of the first atomic bomb,” he said. But he warned that, like atomic weapons, genetic engineering technology can also lead to the destruction of human society if it is not controlled.