Eric Lander Ph.D., President and Founding Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard www.broadinstitute.org sat down for a lunchtime conversation with Walter Isaacson, President and CEO, of the Aspen Institute www.aspeninstitute.org on April 18, 2016 in Washington D.C.
They both emphasized the game changing role that the power of genomics can play to transform the understanding and treatment of disease. It was also agreed that the understanding of genomics will greatly enhance the role that precision medicine www.whitehouse.gov/precision-medicine can play now and in the future.
As Dr. Lander told the attendees, “Technology is playing an important role in gene engineering. In order to move ahead in genetic engineering, research labs have adopted a new technology called “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat” or referred to simply as CRISPR which can make specific changes in the DNA of humans.
Compared to previous techniques this new approach is much faster and easier. The new technology has many researchers looking toward medical applications for the technology and developing treatments for genetic diseases.
For example, if a viral infection threatens a bacterial cell, the CRISPR immune system can thwart the attack by destroying the genome of the invading virus which includes genetic material that is necessary for the virus to continue replicating. So by destroying the viral genome, the CRISPR immune system protects bacteria from ongoing viral infections.
So far, the Broad Institute a leader in analyzing cancer genomes, has identified more than one hundred new genes that underlie cancer and have systematically charted the genetic vulnerabilities of tumor types. The Institute has a repository of more than 1.3 million biological samples.
However, with the advancement of technology in medicine, Dr, Lander pointed out that moving ahead with precision medicine is going to require some changes in privacy issues as it will become even more important to share genetic and medical data.