Doctors Are Trying to Use CRISPR to Fight Cancer. The 1st Trial Suggests It's Safe.

[Disir]

In the first clinical trial of its kind, researchers used the gene-editing tool CRISPR to fine-tune the DNA of people's immune cells, in hopes of fighting cancer.

Now, preliminary data from the trial suggest that this technique is safe for use in cancer patients.

gene editing of these cells," study co-author Dr. Edward Stadtmauer, a professor of oncology at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Associated Press.

Still, "this treatment is not ready for prime time," Stadtmauer added in an interview with NPR. "But it is definitely very promising."
Doctors Are Trying to Use CRISPR to Fight Cancer. The 1st Trial Suggests It's Safe. | Live Science

They need to hurry up with this treatment.

 

[basquebromance]

Slash, poison, burn. That’s what cancer specialist Dr. Azra Raza calls the protocol of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. We spend $150 billion each year treating cancer, yet a patient with cancer is as likely to die of it today as one was 50 years ago. Raza is the author of the new book “The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last.” She argues that experiments and the funding for eradicating cancer look at the disease when it is in its later stages, when the cancer has grown and spread. Instead, she says, the focus should be on the very first stages — the first cell, as her book is titled. She says this type of treatment would be more effective, cheaper and less toxic.