For the first time, doctors have tried to cure blindness by hacking a patient's genome using CRISPR technology.
The Associated Press reports that a team from the Oregon Institute of Health and Science injected three drops of liquid that delivered fragments of CRISPR DNA directly into the patient's eyeball, in the hopes that this would reverse a rare genetic condition called Leber's congenital amaurosis that causes blindness in childhood.
“We have the potential for people who are born blind to see,” said Charles Albright, researcher at Editas Medicine.
Editas is one of the biotech companies that has developed the cure. “We think this could open up a whole new set of drugs to help change your DNA.”
Although some genetic conditions can be treated with conventional gene therapy, which replaces the entire mutated gene rather than editing it, patients with Leber's congenital amaurosis are out of luck. The gene associated with the disease is too large to replace, so doctors turned to CRISPR to correct the mutation.
“Once a cell is edited, it will become permanent, and that cell will last, hopefully, for the patient's life,” said Eric Pearce, a physician at the University of Massachusetts who worked on the project.
It will take doctors about a month to find out if this treatment has worked. If that happens, the team plans to edit the genome of 18 more patients.
Sources: Photo: (Victor Freitas / Unsplash)
