CRISPR Enlists in War on Cancer
July 14, 2017
7/14/17 – In what may be “the beginning of something big,” a scientific advisory panel for the US Food and Drug Administration has recommended approval of a new type of therapy that genetically alters a patient’s own immune system to fight cancer. The therapy draws fundamentally on a revolutionary technique, called CRISPR/Cas9, for editing genes precisely and with relative ease. As CRISPR/Cas9 was emerging from the laboratory, Issues published a series of articles based on an international summit that reviewed the technology’s backstory and examined the social, legal, ethical, and policy questions essential to understanding how (or whether) to move it into broader use.