Chinese scientists will perform the world’s first genetic editing trial on humans this month, in an attempt to find a cure for lung cancer.
A group of oncologists at the West China Hospital of Sichuan University, Chengdu, will inject patients with cells that have been modified using the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technique, state-run Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday.
CRISPR, short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, was named “2015 Breakthrough of the Year” by the US journal Science.
It allows scientists to selectively edit genome parts and replace them with new DNA stretches. Cas9 is an enzyme that can edit DNA, allowing the alteration of genetic patterns by genome modification.
CRISPR is a collection of DNA sequences that direct Cas9 where to cut and paste. Lu You, director of the hospital’s thoracic oncology department and the leader of the trial, said his team was formed at the end of last year and the trial received ethical approval from the hospital’s review board on July 6.
“We plan to select 10 volunteers, all advanced lung cancer patients who have undergone chemot-herapy, radiation therapy and other types of treatment. We received a lot of applications and are now busy screening and drawing up our final selection list,” he said.
The editing therapy treatment periods will last from eight weeks to three months.
The whole trial could last over a year, he said. Doctors will extract T cells, a type of immune cell, from the patient’s blood and then knock out the gene that encodes the PD-1 protein, which normally limits the cell’s capacity to launch an immune response.
