Prime Editing
Imagine finding out your child has a lethal disease such as Tay-Sachs, which is a rare inherited genetic disease that attacks the brain and spinal cord. The disease found in a baby usually causes the death of the child by the age of four. It is always fatal. Now imagine the doctor tells you that he can cure your child by fixing the DNA strands inside the child that causes this disease. He explains he will simply snip out the bad genes, replace them with a few good genes… Poof- problem solved. A few years ago this would have sounded like science fiction, nowadays this is very real. Thanks to the budding field of genome editing, miracles may be on the way.
DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is not only a molecule, but it also contains the genetic code to support life. It is this code that is the building blocks of life and differentiates one species from another. DNA was discovered in 1953 by two scientists named James Watson and Francis Crick, but it was not until 2003 that scientists were able to fully decode the human genome. Like scientific cryptologists, they literally cracked the code to what makes us. In cracking the code, scientists have begun to unravel the mysteries presented by all sorts of diseases and genetic mutations.
How can doctors change the sequence of life to help cure diseases such as Tay-Sachs? Recently there has been a development in technology that has allowed scientists to manipulate genes referred to as gene editing. One of the recent technologies created that helps with gene editing is called Prime Editing. What exactly is Prime Editing and what does it do? Prime Editing is a genome-altering technique that can correct certain nucleotides with great efficiency and precision. Prime Editing can be used to perform small deletions, insertions, and swap the DNA’s base in a precise manner, removing or changing small segments of the DNA strand. Therefore scientists can use Prime Editing to correct genetic diseases. It would be like taking a scissor to cut out bad genes in the DNA to replace them with healthy genes. Although Prime Editing is the best gene-editing technique currently in the world, it was not the first.
The first major breakthrough in gene editing was called CRISPR. CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. Discovered in 2012, by an international team of scientists, CRISPR first revolutionized the concept of gene editing. CRISPR works very similarly to Prime Editing but it is still different because as it’s predecessor it was not as refined. When CRISPR is used it breaks the DNA strands to destroy the mutation, but it destroys both strands. Instead of just getting rid of the DNA, Prime Editing is able to more precisely edit the strand, even a single strand, to change the mutation in the DNA. When Prime Editing is used scientists are able to locate the mixed up chemical pairing inside of the DNA and correct the mix-up.
Prime Editing is important because we have begun to unlock the secrets of what makes up diseases and mutations in the human body, and now we can devise a cure for them. Right now scientists are only testing Prime Editing on a handful of gene mutations, including Tay-Sachs and Sickle Cell Disease, but Prime Editing will become way more useful in the future. Chemical biologists such as Harvard’s Dr. David Liu and Dr. Andrew Anzalone are pioneers in Prime Editing. They predict that Prime Editing will cure up to 89 percent of disease-linked genetic mutations in the future. This would greatly benefit people in the future because it will become less likely to get a genetic disease and totally eradicate most others. Prime Editing is a great asset to have for the future and will definitely change the world through its importance.
If you would like to read more in-depth about Prime Editing, I will link more sources down below.
https://www.synthego.com/guide/crispr-methods/prime-editing
These are the links for my images:
https://www.pinclipart.com/pindetail/hbRixR_file-dna-simple-svg-simple-dna-clipart/
https://www.pinterest.nz/pin/102034747786023588/
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03164-5
https://blog.gao.gov/2020/04/23/crispr-a-technology-that-could-help-in-the-fight-against-covid-19/
