7th Sense

The title may be baffling but the recent chemistry Nobel Prize won by Dr.Jennifer Doudna and Dr.Emmanuelle Charpentier has a deep connection with a South Indian movie which I saw called “Ezham Arivu” or in English the 7th sense. It’s all about transforming our human blueprint (genes) or gene editing to better our lives.

Let it be COVID-19, cancer, HIV, genetic disorders, etc there goes an endless list of heartbreakers without a vaccine or a permanent solution. But what if genetics can transform these? A dream of every humane human. Here comes our CRISPR/Cas9, biotechnology’s sharpest tool, this year’s Nobel winner, to give a helping hand.

Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindrome Repeats (CRISPR) /cas9 helps to alter, update, delete our code of life (DNA) similar to any editor or SQL commands in the database region. Now how does it do? CRISPR, a part of bacteria’s immunological system responds to any incoming threatening virus and produces a customized RNA, which can translate DNA into proteins, and with the help of the Cas gene producing cas9 enzyme chops the DNA.

In simple terms, they are

scissors to cleave any DNA other than viruses’ in a controlled manner

and CRISPR/cas9 ‘s adaptability and usability can contribute to this aspect.

Hopes include editing the CCR5 gene which is the target spot of HIV viruses, bone marrow gene editing in case of sickle cell disease, etc. It can even stop further requirements of blood transfusions in the case of sickle cell disease.

COVID-19 brought to our attention, more than curing the disease “memory cells” which can produce antibodies to counter future virus attacks is required. A vaccine candidate with that ability will be considered as effective.CRISPR/cas9 can create such cells to fight future attacks. CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB) introduced the covid test kit “Feluda” based on this technology.

Countless applications of this can break many barriers of human life and we can even say it triggers a subculture called “biohacking”. Even though existing medical norms and laws demand extensive tests to prove it’s reaching, everyone can give a standing ovation to this technology regarding current results.

After all “Health is Wealth”.