Scientists are at it again with a new technology called CRISPR which is said to be capable of detecting and curing all types of diseases that were before now impossible.
With this new technology, health challenges like sickle-cell anemia, HIV, schizophrenia and Austin and any health challenge involving bad DNA is about to be properly handled just like other curable diseases that are common to man.
Genetic diseases are known to cause the muscle fibers in the face, shoulders, upper arms, and every other effected parts of the body to weaken over time; which had remained without any known cure, but that is about to end now!
CRISPR, according to the researchers, can do so many things that were impossible before now. This new discovery can easily assist in changing, deleting or even replacing bad genes in plants, animals, and humans inclusive.
The ease of doing this is compared to the precision of find-and-replace-function on a word document wonderful! you may say. An article in MIT Technology simply put it this way, “This means they can rewrite the human genome at will”.
How this new technology might change the approaches to diseases are now said to be the major worries of the Biomedical researchers all over the world.
Though to some medical practitioners in affluent countries this may not be a new thing because about a year ago, a team of FSHD researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School gave it a try which enabled them to have some pretty good ideas of the thousands of genes in the human genome that causes diseases.
The discovery of CRISPR which assisted the researchers back then, is now said to be better equipped to handle even more complicated cases of genetic related problems.
CRISPR stands for -‘cluster of regular inter spaced short palindromic repeats’-. But no matter how or what this new technology is capable of doing, one question that people are asking, is “Can the new tech turn off the gene without shutting down the system on the process”? The next question is, could this new tech be used to turn off a human diseases genes?
Both questions were answered by Charis Himeda, a lead author on the study, with this words: ‘I think there’s reason to be really hopeful that some day it’ll actually lead to great therapies for genetic diseases as long as we’re not too eager to get this to the clinic right away,” She also added:
“I think progress for any disease is really progress for all diseases, because a lot of these therapies and technologies are going to turn out to be broadly applicable,” she said.
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