International Gene Editing Conference Declines to Ban Eventual Use in Humans

LA Times Dec 3, 2015  Melissa Healy

An international conference on gene editing on Thursday left the door open to future use, in humans, of new techniques that alter an organism’s genetic architecture in ways that carry forward to future generations.

With questions of safety, need and ethics still unanswered, the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine; the United Kingdom’s Royal Society; and the Chinese Academy of Science agreed that “it would be …

Gene Editing—A Revolution From Stem to Stern

The Lancet  Dec 15, 2015  Rebecca Cooney, Editor

Gene editing has swiftly become one of the most promising—and controversial—breakthroughs in genetic engineering.

With the entrance of CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), a technique using  the Cas9 enzyme to cut strands of the genome at precisely targeted locations to insert, replace, or remove DNA, the manipulation of the genetic basis of human disease has once again come to the fore.

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Much of the excitement …

Stem Cell Therapy Research Yields HUGE Results In Multiple Sclerosis

MSUnites.com Nov 5, 2015

Overview:

A new stem cell treatment has sent most of the MS patients who tried it into remission, halting the progression of the disease even several years afterwards.

In a recent clinical study at the COloroda Blood Cancer Institute 24 patients with relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS) underwent a three month procedure destroying their immune systems and then had their immune systems restarted using stem cell therapy.

The Study:

The clinical