My Linda
Now here is
a fascinating article, brought to us by Dr. Francis Collins by way of his NIH
blog. The work he describes was done by
some exceedingly smart people at U. Wisconsin-Madison.
First: you
know what “nano” means, right. When used
in measurement it means one-billionth of a meter. That’s, like, small. For example, one nanometer is about how much
your fingernails grow every second.
A number of times we have
mulled over the potential for using CRISPR Cas technology to cure disease. One significant speed bump in doing this is
that the vital package has to be delivered by virus. As I perceive it, you find or engineer a
virus to specifically target a particular kind of cell, making sure aforehand
that it doesn’t also carry something like, say, the Black Death. (I think you just kill it.) Then you stuff the virus with your CRISPR
death machine, and inject it in huge quantities into the blood stream. This works well for some types of cancer, but
it is significantly prone to negative side effects.
Well, the
Wisconsin folks seem to have shown that you can substitute nanoparticles for
the virus. They can enclose the CRISPR
apparatus in a nanoparticle that is only 25 nm in diameter. The exterior of the little ball consists of
some substance that won’t dissolve in the bloodstream. It (the surface) also is studded with
peptides that will glom onto a particular kind of cell – specifically the ones
you are hoping to alter. Once the little
nanoparticle finds the correct cell and becomes attached, it is allowed to pass
through the cell wall into the cytoplasm.
However, the exterior of the nanoparticle is composed of something that
dissolves in cytoplasmic goo. The CRISPR
apparatus is thereby released, to find its way to the nucleus and do its thing.
Sounds good
to me. Works in a Petri dish, and on
mice. Let’s be optimistic.
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