Eric Espinoza, a scientist, researcher and biohacker at Esper Therapeutics, spoke in a pre-lunch session which was heavily focused on CRISPR, which is a fairly new gene-editing technique that even amateurs can experiment with because it’s relatively low cost. The idea that sticks with me from this conversation was his example of home pregnancy tests and how they used to not be available to consumers; only doctors offices confirmed pregnancies. But maybe by 2050 we can diagnose disease — and design our own treatments/therapies — with advancements in biohacking.
Loose notes…
The focus on biologicals right now are on antibodies, i.e. Which ones will kill cancer cells?
He’s part of the group Biocurious— biohacking — a place to try biological things
Personalized cancer and viral therapy
Crispr kit you take an organism and edit its genome.
The enzyme functionally edits dna. 159 bucks. DIY crispr kit
CRISPR
Crispr has a protein to find RNA, and once it finds the gene it cuts the RNA.
Everyone has cells and trying to get protein inside the cells isn’t easy. Eric tried to get CRISPR inside of cells. The goal was to find a cancer therapy. Worked really well for integrated viruses.
TWIST Biosciences. A DNA synthesis company which has “changed the landscape for DNA synthesis”
CRISPR is 2000 base pairs. TWIST makes genes at five cents per base pair. DNA is going to be super cheap in ten years, maybe sub-penny or less.
You buy all these DNA pairs, and then you buy bacteria, and you force the protein that’s made out of the DNA code into the bacteria. We take these vials and we force the proteins to be made from it, then we kill off the bacteria and then harvest the protein from it.
The synthesis process is pretty good overall, there are sometimes errors, but if there are problems the fixit pair IDs errors.
HOW TO FUND?
NIH grant. Need data to support the grant. Too risky for govt to fund without. Alternative is to support money from VC. They take a lot of equity and control and you no longer have as much. We wanted to show some proof of principle first. Can we get any reasonable data that suggests we are moving in there right direction?
Experiment.com was the route for the reporting
Biocurious offers lab space as a community/sharing pooling resources to drive experiemnt/proof of principle costs down
Should we constrain this/limit access?
There’s lots of talk about the home pregnancy test. The gatekeepers didnt think people could handle the information. I never grew up in a world where a doctor had to test you for pregnancy. I think we saw a lot of similar things with HIV and now we have home HIV tests. All of those fears were unfounded. The fears about CRISPR are unfounded. There is no real way to take CRISPR and ruin everyone else, you can research on a small scale but modifying yourself is impossible. You have a lot of cells in you, and getting CRISPR into that cell is very, very challenging. We have to use electric jolts to force an organism to take a protein. There are some chemical ways to do it but you’d lose 40, 50 percent of your cells
A lot of countries are more cavalier about medical advances. FDA learned a lot about thalidomide in the 50s. But maybe we went too far in the other direction, so other countries are likely to pioneer a lot.
China Genomic Group are the biggest sequencers of all. They have done gene editing on human eggs. They must have gone though hundreds of thousands of eggs to get one edited. What’s the downstream effect? What will happen to this egg? I think they did pigs to knock out the growth hormone of crispr, and pigs were not as sensitive to crispr as humans.
Ethical question: Eugenics.
“Seems so far away, such a foreign, visceral no” that to think that was a regular eugenics exhibits in the 1930s is … if you had access to 100K, a million, the gene drive aspect might only work 5-7 generations. I’m not so confident that’s a real problem.
There are a few papers from Natl Academy of Sciences where they were using gene drive to try and see how long they could keep genes promoted in mosquitoes. After 7 generations, it doesn’t take over the long period.
Gates Foundation is spending a lot of money to eradicate malaria mosquitoes. One question is can we run a gene drive to eradicate a species? How many would you need to put out there? You’re still looking at 10K mosquitoes, if you have a million mosquitoes. You’re going to edit tens of thousands of mosquitoes for every one right now. That’s assuming natural selection doesn’t take over. We see it in antibiotic resistance.
NIH launches genome editing initiative — 190 million over the next few years. THere’s interest in accelerating the research and bringing collaborations and partnerships. Is the public even aware of what the conversation is? Are we too worried about designer babies or eugenics that we are missing unknown unknowns?
Direct to consumer genetic testing:
FDA authorized it in March of this year, to test for BRCA. 23 and Me stopped doing it four years ago but now FDA is allowing it.
DOD comes in once a year to Biocurious to think about making terrible biological weapons with this, but then they come out thinking, ok there are a lot of processes in place to prevent things like that. The DOD is all over this.
Genomic Medicine forecast: Emerging medical discipline involving using genomic info about an individual as part of their clinical care (for diagnostic, prevention, and therapeutic decision making)
We are going to be trying to figure out how to weigh cancer vs therapeutics. When CRISPR made waves the hope was that there was something that would modify the genome with an interchangeable part that’s cheap. Talon cost 100K dollars to make. CRISPR decreases that cost dramatically. There’s a lot of hope and energy and we can use these tools out of genetic problems and diseases. There’s a lot of worry about baby engineering but with those papers … so far it’s not promising for fixing a problem at this point. You’d have to start weighing the costs. Is it better, or not? How is the cost of a designer baby worthwhile?
The revolution will be diagnostic. You do your first test with next generation sequences, then your second pass with CRISPR to either confirm or deny.
We could find that diagnosing conditions are really cheap and easy (like pregnancy) but it doesn’t get into dropping cost of therapies and cures. The papers about the next 10 years put a big damper on the field for awhile.
Future Human 