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Comment by nickles | Hacker News Reader

This will likely not be an impediment to treatments based on CRISPR. The study has been available in preprint form for ~6 months on biorxiv [0]. At least some of the companies researching CRISPR were aware of this issue at the time the paper was released. It has since been mitigated, as specified at the bottom of the article. From Gaetan Burgio's tweets:

"Published now in @NatureMedicine on #CRISPR & Immunity to SpCas9. 6 months has past since the preprint was online & it is a long time in the CRISPR field. Since then additional work showed how to circumvented this by modifying Cas9 protein or using Cas9 orthologs. So No panic !" [1]

[0] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/04/04/295139

[1] https://twitter.com/GaetanBurgio/status/1057206850213441542

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It's really amazing that humanity is at the stage where we're intentionally evading our own immunity to bacterial components so we can repurpose the components to help ourselves.

What if it’s actually just time travelers coming back to code the immunity into us to protect us from the unintended consequences of gene hacking?

(This is a joke, in case that needs clarifying)

It's already like hacking some alien computer in a short amount of time :)

There's got to be a great scifi story in there somewhere.

This is the plot of the Trunks storyline in Dragon Ball Z.

I know right. I also just came from an article that had to use an electron microscope to photograph the accelerometer in our phones. I never realised how small things have gotten.

"iPhones are allergic to helium"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18340693

but it's a bit sad that it can't intentionally help it to handle cancer.

Yet.

By the way, "cancer" is a class of diseases, not a single disease to treat, and many of them currently have CRISPR-derived treatments being actively developed.

Looking forward to the days that even the worst kinds of cancerous tissues would be a drug or two away from complete destruction. I hope that at one point, when someone asks about what would happen if a single maintainer of a project gets cancer tomorrow or gets hit by a bus, the answer would be, "well she/he can take a pill, and, what is this 'bus' thing you oldies keep joking about anyway?" :)

Cancer is my worst fear and has also killed so many of my family and loved ones. It's a slow painful death where you get progressively weaker. I really do hope there is some light at the end of the tunnel there.

I'm no expert. Do you believe it's just a question of time ?

Well, the experts do at least.

I think this is obvious to anyone familiar with bacteria and immunity. The headlines will go for the 'CRISPR is dead" angle, but the work arounds are simple and relatively easy to implement. I think the article is still extremely valuable. It shows that, yes, we target CRISPR just like any other microbiome protein hanging out in a mucus membrane. But it also shows that it's not a threat (or an indicator of a threat).

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