China to Test CRISPR on Human Beings

A team of Chinese scientists will be the first in the world to apply the revolutionary gene-editing technique known as Crispr on human subjects.

Led by Lu You, an oncologist at Sichuan University’s West China hospital in Chengdu, China, the team plan to start testing cells modified with Crispr on patients with lung cancer in August, according to the journal Nature.

Crispr is a game-changer in bioscience; a groundbreaking technique which can find, cut out and replace specific parts of DNA using a specially programmed enzyme named Cas9. Its ramifications are next to endless, from changing the color of mouse fur to designing malaria-free mosquitoes and pest-resistant crops to correcting a wide swath of genetic diseases like sickle-cell anaemia in humans.

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A CRISPR Tool for RNA Found

Researchers including Feng Zhang have confirmed that a bacterial protein hypothesized as a tool for targeted editing of RNA, similar to how CRISPR-Cas9 targets DNA, can indeed be used as an alternate editing approach. The finding holds important implications for a range of biological applications, such as marking, modifying and modulating RNA. Roughly half of all bacteria species utilize an immune system called the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats and CRISPR-associated genes (CRISPR-Cas), which protects the microbes from viruses and other invading DNA. While much focus in recent years has been directed at the ability to harness CRISPR-Cas systems to edit DNA, systems that specifically target RNA have been less studied. Here, Zhang and colleagues build on previous work to characterize the behavior of a new type of CRISPR-CAS system, C2c2, suspected to target RNA. Through a series of experiments, the researchers demonstrate that C2c2 can be used to cleave single-stranded RNA, but not double-stranded RNA; as well, it can be used to knockout messenger RNA of bacteria in vivo. In testing the ability of C2c2 to target specific RNA in Escherichia coli, the team found that it initially focuses on its target RNA, followed by a second phase in which it degrades RNA in a less specific way. Other RNA-targeting immune systems likely exist, the authors say, and further research will lead to the development of programmable molecular tools for in vivo RNA manipulation. One example includes modulating RNA function and translation, which could be used for large-scale screening of biological molecules, construction of synthetic regulatory circuits and other purposes, the authors say.

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A Biotech Company Seeks to..Raise the Dead?!

A groundbreaking trial to see if it is possible to regenerate the brains of dead people, has won approval from health watchdogs.

A biotech company in the US has been granted ethical permission to recruit 20 patients who have been declared clinically dead from a traumatic brain injury, to test whether parts of their central nervous system can be brought back to life.

Scientists will use a combination of therapies, which include injecting the brain with stem cells and a cocktail of peptides, as well as deploying lasers and nerve stimulation techniques which have been shown to bring patients out of comas.

The trial participants will have been certified dead and only kept alive through life support. They will be monitored for several months using brain imaging equipment to look for signs of regeneration, particularly in the upper spinal cord - the lowest region of the brain stem which controls independent breathing and heartbeat.

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Mad Scientist Detected! BioViva CEO Uses "Anti Aging" Gene Therapy on Herself

The way BioViva founder Elizabeth Parrish sees it, biological aging is a disease – and she’s willing to bet her life on a cure.

Last fall, the 45-year-old Seattle-area woman underwent an experimental type of gene therapy aimed at addressing some of the big effects of aging, including loss of muscle mass and a shortening of the chromosomes’ telomeres. The procedure was reportedly done in Colombia, to get around U.S. regulations.

The idea of having gene therapy done on yourself raised eyebrows in the biotech community, but Parrish was unfazed.

“I 100 percent believe that it will work, or else I wouldn’t have done it,” Parrish told GeekWire during an interview in February. “I didn’t try to flame out in glory. The research shows that it should absolutely work.”

Now BioViva is reporting that it does seem to work, at least on Parrish’s telomeres. And that’s likely to fuel a debate over the widening scientific quest for greater longevity – conducted not only by BioViva, but by other ventures such as Human Longevity Inc. This week, Human Longevity announced a 10-year deal with AstraZeneca to analyze 500,000 DNA samples for anti-aging clues.

Parrish is already trying to follow up on a couple of clues through Bioviva USA, the privately held company she founded on Bainbridge Island last year. Bioviva announced its own deal this week with a London-based investment fund called Deep Knowledge Life Sciences.

One of BioViva’s anti-aging clues has to do with a protein called myostatin: Research suggests that genetically blocking the production of myostatin could help preserve age-related muscle loss.

The other clue has to do with telomeres, the stretches of DNA at the ends of our chromosomes that are thought to protect our genetic data from harmful mutations – much as the plastic tips on the ends of shoelaces keep them from unraveling. As we age, those telomeres become shorter, and the protective effect is gradually lost.

The gene therapy that Parrish underwent was aimed at inhibiting myostatin and building up telomeres.

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China Planning Cloning Factory for end of Year Opening

The ambitious and futuristic facility hopes to be mass-producing one million cows every 12 months by 2020.

Not only will it clone cattle, but the factory, which will be located in the northern Chinese port of Tianjin, will also cater to more specific needs by genetically engineering police dogs and thoroughbred race horses.

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Massachusetts General Hospital Develops Improved CRISPR

A new engineered version of the gene-editing CRISPR-Cas9 nuclease appears to robustly abolish the unwanted, off-target DNA breaks that are a significant current limitation of the technology, reducing them to undetectable levels. In their report receiving advance online publication in Nature, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers describe how altering the Cas9 enzyme to reduce non-specific interactions with the target DNA may greatly expand applications of the gene-editing technology.

"Our creation of a Cas9 variant that brings off-target effects to levels where we can no longer detect them, even with the most sensitive methods, provides a substantial advance for therapeutic applications in which you want to accurately hit your target without causing damage anywhere else in the genome," says J. Keith Joung, MD, PhD, associate chief for Research and the Jim and Ann Orr MGH Research Scholar in the MGH Department of Pathology, senior author of the Nature paper. "But its impact will also be incredibly important for research applications because off-target effects can potentially confound the results of any experiment. As a result, we envision that our high-fidelity variant will supplant the use of standard Cas9 for many research and therapeutic applications."

Used to create targeted DNA breaks at which genetic changes can be introduced, CRISPR-Cas9 nucleases combine a bacterial DNA-cutting enzyme called Cas9 with a short guide RNA sequence that can bind to the target DNA sequence. While easier to use than previous gene-editing tools, CRISPR-Cas9 nucleases have a well-characterized and significant limitation. As described in 2013 studies led by Joung and others, CRISPR-Cas9 nucleases can induce off-target DNA breaks at sites that resemble the on-target sequence. Subsequent investigations by Joung's team and others have reduced but never completely and consistently eliminated these off-target effects.

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Gasoline as a Biofuel?

Imagine a world where vehicles run on beer. Some might think of this as a devastating waste of good hops, but a University of Maryland (UMD) team sees a lot of promise for the idea. The team has been awarded a patent for a process that uses natural microorganisms to ferment biomass or gases into hydrocarbons. In short, they've figured out how to brew gasoline naturally.

The inventors, Professor Richard Kohn and Faculty Research Associate Dr. Seon-Woo Kim, are at the University of Maryland, had been awarded a patent for microorganisms that are ethanol-tolerant and which produce ethanol from biomass materials. The team has now been awarded a similar patent for the same process, but producing hexane and octane, the core ingredients of gasoline. In both cases, the fuels separate from the biomass and rise to the surface of a fermentation broth.

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Fungal Furniture

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Scientists Have Been Growing, Implanting Teeth in Mice

One annoying fact of life is losing teeth. Since humans only get two sets of teeth, losing an adult dinner grinder means either going without or replacing it with a substitute made of something like ceramic or metal. A more natural solution is the subject of a project by a team of scientists in Japan that is working on growing multiple, fully-functional teeth and implanting them in mice.

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Stepping Toward Therapeutic use of CRISPR

Stepping toward therapeutic CRISPR

Authors:

Gagnon et al

Abstract:

Most new technologies for manipulating gene expression in mammalian cells are accepted at a relatively slow pace. Occasionally, however, a new technology is so robust and fills such a critical niche that its adoption is widespread and rapid. Fifteen years ago, duplex RNAs were such a technology. RNA interference (RNAi) in mammalian cells was first demonstrated in 2001 (1) and within 2 y RNAi was a commonly used tool throughout industry and academia. RNAi is making its way into clinical trials as a potential therapeutic as challenges in delivery to relevant tissues begin to be overcome (2–4).

China's Plans for a Clone Factory for Food

In Chinese mythology, the Monkey King is a beast with magical fur. All he has to do is pull out a hair, blow on it and it is instantly transformed into a clone of himself.

Xu Xiaochun, chief executive of BoyaLife, says the fable is not far from reality, as far as his Chinese biotechnology company is concerned. This week he announced an investment of $31m in a joint venture with South Korea’s Sooam Biotech that aims to clone 1m cows a year from their hair cells.

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Sometime next year, researchers in BoyaLife’s laboratory on the outskirts of the coastal city of Tianjin will take skin cells from a few carefully chosen cattle (Kobe beef is Mr Xu’s favourite). The scientists will extract the nucleus from each cell and place it into an unfertilised egg from another cow. The cloned embryos will then be implanted in surrogate dairy cows housed on cattle ranches throughout China.

His ambition is staggering. Starting with 100,000 cloned cattle embryos a year in “phase one”, Mr Xu envisages 1m annually at some point in the future. That would make BoyaLife by far the largest clone factory in the world.

Mr Xu says the latest techniques enable cloning to be carried out in an “assembly line format” at a rate of less than 1 minute per cell. Based on a four- hour shift and 250 working days a year, a proficient cloner would “manufacture” 60,000 cloned cow embryos a year, he says, adding that a team of 50 will be sufficient for the planned scale of the project. Mr Xu plans to have a staff of 300 and eventual total investment is estimated at $500m.

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Safety Concerns About Synthetic Biology Leaving the Lab

Targeted cancer treatments, toxicity sensors and living factories: synthetic biology has the potential to revolutionize science and medicine. But before the technology is ready for real-world applications, more attention needs to be paid to its safety and stability, say experts in a review article published in Current Opinion in Chemical Biology.

Synthetic biology involves engineering microbes like bacteria to program them to behave in certain ways. For example, bacteria can be engineered to glow when they detect certain molecules, and can be turned into tiny factories to produce chemicals.

Synthetic biology has now reached a stage where it's ready to move out of the lab and into the real world, to be used in patients and in the field. According to Professor Pamela Silver, one of the authors of the article from Harvard Medical School in the US, this move means researchers should increase focus on the safety of engineered microbes in biological systems like the human body.

"Historically, molecular biologists engineered microbes as industrial organisms to produce different molecules," said Professor Silver. "The more we discovered about microbes, the easier it was to program them. We've now reached a very exciting phase in synthetic biology where we're ready to apply what we've developed in the real world, and this is where safety is vital."

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No Cloning Down on the Farm in the European Union

The European Parliament today voted to ban the cloning of all farm animals as well as the sale of cloned livestock, their offspring, and products derived from them. The measure, which passed by a large margin, goes beyond a directive proposed by the European Commission in 2013, which would have implemented a provisional ban on the cloning of just five species: cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, and horses.

The supporters of the ban cited animal welfare concerns, claiming that only a small percentage of cloned offspring survive to term, and many die shortly after birth.

The ban does not cover cloning for research purposes, nor does it prevent efforts to clone endangered species.

Companies in the United States and in China are cloning livestock for breeding and for research purposes, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found no significant differences between healthy clones and healthy animals from conventional breeding. It considers meat and other products form clones to be as safe as that from other farm animals.

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In the Future, Artificial Photosynthetic "Plants" may Produce Natural gas and Gasoline

Imagine creating artificial plants that make gasoline and natural gas using only sunlight. And imagine using those fuels to heat our homes or run our cars without adding any greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. By combining nanoscience and biology, researchers led by scientists at University of California, Berkeley, have taken a big step in that direction.

Peidong Yang, a professor of chemistry at Berkeley and co-director of the school's Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute, leads a team that has created an artificial leaf that produces methane, the primary component of natural gas, using a combination of semiconducting nanowires and bacteria. The research, detailed in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in August, builds on a similar hybrid system, also recently devised by Yang and his colleagues, that yielded butanol, a component in gasoline, and a variety of biochemical building blocks.

The research is a major advance toward synthetic photosynthesis, a type of solar power based on the ability of plants to transform sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into sugars. Instead of sugars, however, synthetic photosynthesis seeks to produce liquid fuels that can be stored for months or years and distributed through existing energy infrastructure.

In a roundtable discussion on his recent breakthroughs and the future of synthetic photosynthesis, Yang said his hybrid inorganic/biological systems give researchers new tools to study photosynthesis -- and learn its secrets.

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Improving Photosynthesis Through Biotech for Food and Bio Fuels

Redesigning photosynthesis to sustainably meet global food and bioenergy demand

Authors:

Ort et al

Abstract:

The world’s crop productivity is stagnating whereas population growth, rising affluence, and mandates for biofuels put increasing demands on agriculture. Meanwhile, demand for increasing cropland competes with equally crucial global sustainability and environmental protection needs. Addressing this looming agricultural crisis will be one of our greatest scientific challenges in the coming decades, and success will require substantial improvements at many levels. We assert that increasing the efficiency and productivity of photosynthesis in crop plants will be essential if this grand challenge is to be met. Here, we explore an array of prospective redesigns of plant systems at various scales, all aimed at increasing crop yields through improved photosynthetic efficiency and performance. Prospects range from straightforward alterations, already supported by preliminary evidence of feasibility, to substantial redesigns that are currently only conceptual, but that may be enabled by new developments in synthetic biology. Although some proposed redesigns are certain to face obstacles that will require alternate routes, the efforts should lead to new discoveries and technical advances with important impacts on the global problem of crop productivity and bioenergy production.

Congress Seeks to ban Human Embryo Modification, Requiring /RELIGIOUS/ Panel for Review of US Institute of Medicine Report

The US House of Representatives is wading into the debate over whether human embryos should be modified to introduce heritable changes. Its fiscal year 2016 spending bill for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would prohibit the agency from spending money to evaluate research or clinical applications for such products.

In an unusual twist, the bill—introduced on June 17—would also direct the FDA to create a committee that includes religious experts to review a forthcoming report from the US Institute of Medicine (IOM). The IOM's analysis, which considers the ethics of creating embryos that have three genetic parents, was commissioned by the FDA.

The House legislation comes during a time of intense debate on such matters, sparked by the announcement in April that researchers in China had edited the genomes of human embryos. The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) moved quickly to remind the public that a 1996 law prevents the federal government from funding work that destroys human embryos or creates them for research purposes.

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This infuriates me. There are several diseases which have promise to be corrected genetically (cystic fibrosis, frex) which would be far, far easier to correct while the person was still an embryo.  Research needs to be done for this and we can fix problems even before a person's life really begins.   But, no, Congress has to be that stupid.

No, they ahve to be worse.

They are requiring a panel of religious figures to review the ethics report of from the IOM!  Unless they are qualified scientists, they have no fscking place reviewing that report as government representatives!

Closing in on BioArtificial Replacement Limbs

A team of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators has made the first steps towards development of bioartificial replacement limbs suitable for transplantation. In their report, which has been published online in the journal Biomaterials, the researchers describe using an experimental approach previously used to build bioartificial organs to engineer rat forelimbs with functioning vascular and muscle tissue. They also provided evidence that the same approach could be applied to the limbs of primates

"The composite nature of our limbs makes building a functional biological replacement particularly challenging," explains Harald Ott, MD, of the MGH Department of Surgery and the Center for Regenerative Medicine, senior author of the paper. "Limbs contain muscles, bone, cartilage, blood vessels, tendons, ligaments and nerves - each of which has to be rebuilt and requires a specific supporting structure called the matrix. We have shown that we can maintain the matrix of all of these tissues in their natural relationships to each other, that we can culture the entire construct over prolonged periods of time, and that we can repopulate the vascular system and musculature."

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Bolt Threads Successfully Produces Usable Biotech Spider Silk From Yeast

Five years ago, the graduate students behind a secretive startup called Bolt Threads set out to replicate the unique chemical properties of spider silk, an almost magically flexible and durable material that’s in some ways as strong as steel. One of the first things they did was buy a batch of Nephila spiders—the common golden silk orb-weavers—from an insect dealer in Florida. Then they let the spiders spin their webs all over the company’s first office at the University of California at San Francisco. One day a well-known UCSF molecular biologist walked in, saw a spider hanging in a doorway, and ran away screaming.

Scientists, at least those who aren’t arachnophobes, have tried to mass-produce spider silk for decades with little success. Spiders are territorial and cannibalistic—try to farm them, and they end up eating each other. But scientists have long believed that if spiders would only cooperate, fabric made from their silk would be well-suited for use in military and medical equipment, like wound sutures or artificial tendons, as well as in high-performance athletic clothing and other garments.

Bolt Threads has ditched the live spiders but held on to this goal. The company has developed a synthetic alternative to spider silk by engineering proteins identical to the natural threads stretched across the nooks in your basement. It’s raised $40 million from Silicon Valley venture capital firms Foundation Capital, Formation 8, and Founders Fund to commercialize its technology and turn those proteins into fabric. “Over the past few decades, as clothing companies squeezed on price, they’ve taken the innovation out of apparel,” says Dan Widmaier, a graduate of the UCSF Ph.D. program in chemical biology and Bolt’s chief executive officer.

Widmaier and co-founders Ethan Mirsky, Bolt’s vice president for operations, and David Breslauer, its chief scientific officer, are genetically modifying yeast, single-cell organisms that convert simple carbohydrates to proteins through fermentation, and getting them to excrete silk-like proteins. “What would have been done in cells of spiders is now being done by yeast in our lab,” Widmaier says.

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This Can Only End Well! Release Synthetic Biological Organisms to Fight Climate Change

One way to combat climate change could be to release synthetic organisms that sequestrate carbon. How this can be done safely is a question bioengineers are now beginning to address.

The inexorable rise of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and the steady increase in global temperatures raise the frightening prospect of significant change in Earth’s climate. Indeed, the evidence seems clear that our climate is altering rapidly.

So scientists and politicians the world over are looking for ways to halt or reverse these changes, a task that is fraught with difficulties in a world hooked on fossil fuels. One option increasingly discussed is terraforming—deliberately altering the environment in a way that cools the planet, perhaps by absorbing carbon dioxide or reflecting sunlight

To have an impact, these kinds of plans changes must have a global reach require engineering projects of previously unimaginable scale. That’s set bioengineers thinking that there might be an alternative option.

Instead of creating global engineering projects, why not create life forms that do a similar job instead. The big advantage of this approach is that organisms grow naturally and can spread across huge areas of the planet by the ordinary mechanisms of life. Thus the process of terraforming the landscape would occur with minimal human input. What could possibly go wrong?

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I think I can see how the blight in Interstellar could plausibly be created!  ;)

Inside the Emerging World of 3d Printed Body Parts

Laura Bosworth wants to 3D print breast nipples on demand. The CEO of the Texas startup TeVido Biodevices is betting on a future in which survivors of breast cancer who have undergone mastectomies will be able to order up new breasts printed from their own living cells.

“Everyone,” she says, “knows a woman who has had breast cancer.” Right now their options are limited. Reconstructed nipples using state-of-the-art plastic surgery techniques, she says, “tend to flatten and fade and don’t last very long.” A living nipple built from the patient’s own fat cells, and reconstructed to the precise specification of the original nipple, could go a long way to ameliorating the psychological trauma often associated with mastectomies.

Bosworth readily acknowledges that significant obstacles must be overcome before 3D printed breast parts become an affordable reality. Despite the waves of hype that surged after Anthony Atala, a Wake Forest professor, wowed a TED crowd in 2011 by purporting to print a human kidney on stage, no one has yet used a 3D printer to create a functional human organ.

The science is only half the battle. Venture capitalists aren’t exactly beating down the doors of TeVido. It’s a lot easier, observes Bosworth, to raise money “for an app that lets you order a taxi” than for a biomedical breakthrough that will cost millions of dollars in R&D before beginning the lengthy process of clinical trials needed to bring a product to market.

Yet Bosworth is convinced that a $6 billion market awaits whoever gets out of the lab first. “The field itself has grown tremendously,” says TeVido co-founder Thomas Boland, one of the first scientists to start modifying ordinary 3D printers to print layers of living cells instead of ink. Researchers far afield, in China and Russia and Switzerland, at Ivy League labs and in the biotech hotbed of San Diego, are all pushing bioprinting forward. The disciplines of material science, cell biology and computer-controlled manufacturing are all merging.

If we believe everything we’ve heard recently, we’ll be 3D printing our food, our cars, our homes, our electronics—heck, the entire structure of globalized trade will be disrupted when we’re 3D printing everything we need in our living rooms rather than having it shipped in containers from China. The possibilities seem near infinite, even if the present-day realities are constrained.

As overblown as this swirling rhetoric may seem, the realms of science fiction and cold, hard bioprinting fact have convened at least once in real life, in the uncanny meeting of the minds of a nipple builder, a pioneer in tissue fabrication and a (possibly) mad Russian futurist. In that brief convergence one can glimpse the grandiose visions that cautious scientists tend to keep to themselves. Absurdity mingles with the commonplace. And you’re reminded of the most astounding thing of all: how today we’re talking, in matter-of-fact, business-savvy tones, about the actual printing of human body parts.

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