Scientists Precisely Edit DNA In Human Embryos To Fix A Disease Gene

Aug 2, 2017
Originally published on August 2, 2017 9:33 pm


Now, an international team of scientists reports they have, for the first time, figured out a way to successfully edit the DNA in human embryos — without introducing the harmful mutations that were a problem in previous attempts elsewhere. The work was published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

"It's a pretty exciting piece of science," says George Daley, dean of the Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the research. "It's a technical tour de force. It's really remarkable."

The research is ultimately aimed at helping families plagued by genetic diseases. The new experiment used a powerful new gene-editing technique to correct a genetic defect behind a heart disorder that can cause seemingly healthy young people to suddenly die from heart failure.

The experiment corrected the defect in nearly two-thirds of several dozen embryos, without causing potentially dangerous mutations elsewhere in the DNA.

None of the embryos were used to try to create a baby. But if future experiments confirm the techniques are safe and effective, the scientists say the same approach could be used to prevent a long list of inheritable diseases.

"Potentially, we're talking about thousands of genes and thousands of patients," says Paula Amato, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. She was a member of the scientific team from the U.S., China and South Korea.

Other diseases that might ultimately benefit from such an approach include Huntington's disease, cystic fibrosis, perhaps an inherited form of Alzheimer's disease and cases of breast and ovarian cancer caused by mutations in the BRCA genes.

Nonetheless, the work is setting off alarm bells among critics around the world.

"I think it's extraordinarily disturbing," says Marcy Darnovsky, who directs the Center for Genetics and Society, a genetics watchdog group in Berkeley, Calif. "It's a flagrant disregard of calls for a broad societal consensus in decisions about a really momentous technology that could be used good, but in this case is being used in preparation for an extraordinarily risky application."

"If irresponsible scientists are not stopped, the world may soon be presented with a fait accompli of the first [genetically modified] baby," says David King, who heads the U.K-based group Human Genetics Alert. "We call on governments and international organizations to wake up and pass an immediate global ban on creating cloned or GM babies, before it is too late."

Amato and others stress that their work is aimed at preventing terrible diseases, not creating genetically enhanced people. And they note that much more research is needed to confirm the technique is safe and effective before anyone tries to make a baby this way.

But scientists hoping to continue the work in the U.S. face many regulatory obstacles. The National Institutes of Health will not fund any research involving human embryos (the new work was funded by Oregon Health & Science University). And the Food and Drug Administration is prohibited by Congress from considering any experiments that involve genetically modified human embryos.

Nevertheless, the researchers say they're hopeful about continuing the work, perhaps in Britain. The United Kingdom has permitted genetic experiments involving human embryos forbidden in the United States.

"If other countries would be interested, we would be happy to work with their regulatory bodies," says Shoukhrat Mitalipov, director of the Oregon Health & Science University's Center for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy.

One major concern is safety to a developing embryo — whether genetically modified human embryos would indeed produce healthy babies. But on a broader level, any changes made in the DNA of an embryo would be passed down for generations. That raises fears that any mistakes in the editing that inadvertently caused new diseases could become a permanent part of that family's genetic blueprint.

Darnovsky and others also worry that modifying human DNA in an embryo could give rise to "designer babies." That's when parents pick and choose the traits of their children to try to make them smarter, taller, stronger or have other traits that make them seem superior. That's not yet technically possible. But critics fear scientists are already moving in that direction.

"The scenario is that you would have fertility clinics advertising to people who wanted to engineer their future children so that they could be presented as 'enhanced' — as biologically better than everyone else," Darnovsky says. "It's not a world we want to build. It's not a world we want to live in."

Unscrupulous researchers could also rush the technology into fertility clinics to try to start creating babies they can bill as genetically enhanced before the technology has even been proved safe, and before a societal consensus has been reached about what applications should be permitted.

"This is a strong statement that we can do genome editing," says Harvard's Daley. "The question that remains is: 'Should we?' We need a deeper public discourse around the ethical implications of this technology."

Darnovsky and some scientists argue that many couples who carry genetic diseases already have safer alternatives to this sort of gene editing. Couples carrying genetic diseases can go through in vitro fertilization (IVF) and have their embryos tested before being implanted in the womb.

"I will admit to experiencing a sense of puzzlement," says Fyodor Urnov, an associate director at the Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences, a nonprofit research institute in Seattle.

"The question I have is: 'Why did you folks bother, given that there is a safe, effective, approved and ethical way to attain exactly the goal you have set out to do without any of the significant logical and ethic hurdles of having to edit a human embryo?" Urnov says.

Amato and the other scientists on the international team say their approach could offer an alternative for couples for whom those standard options won't work or are less desirable. But they agree the work should only move forward with careful regulatory oversight to prevent abuse.

"Anytime there's a new technology there's a potential for misuse. We have to acknowledge that," Amato says. "Personally I don't feel that's a reason not to pursue the research if you think there's a potential benefit that outweighs that risk. And I think if you can prevent serious disease in future generations, that makes it worthwhile to pursue this."

The advance was first reported last week in Technology Review, a magazine published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But the details were withheld and the researchers did not elaborate until the scientific paper had finished being vetted by other scientists for publication in Nature.

For their experiments, the scientists obtained sperm from a donor carrying a mutation for the heart disorder cardiomyopathy. They then used that sperm to fertilize dozens of eggs obtained from healthy women.

At the same time as fertilization, the researchers injected a powerful, microscopic gene-editing tool known as CRISPR-Cas9. The new technique makes it much easier than previous approaches to make very precise changes in DNA.

Several scientists likened the approach to doing surgery on fetuses when they are in the womb. But this takes that idea much further and involves repairing damaged DNA at a molecular level in the womb.

"This is nano-surgery," says George Church, a prominent Harvard geneticist who also was not involved in the research. "You're doing it with the finest possible scalpel."

The editing tool very accurately cut into a mutated gene known as MYBPC3, which causes cardiomyopathy. To the researchers' surprise, the cut triggered the embryos to repair the defective gene on their own. This is a process that had previously been unknown, the scientists say.

"The most exciting moment was when we realized the mechanism of repair," Amato says. "It was fixing itself."

The researchers then let the embryos develop for several days so they could analyze them to see how well the experiments worked. In one part of the experiments involving 58 embryos, the approach corrected the mutation in more than 70 percent of the embryos, the researchers reported.

"The gene defect was corrected with high efficiency," Amato says.

In addition, a detailed genetic analysis of the embryos concluded that the gene editing had not caused safety problems.

"I think this is a significant advance," Church says. "This is important."

In 2015, Chinese scientists reported trying to edit the DNA of embryos for the first time, also using CRISPR-Cas9. But that experiment involved embryos that could never develop normally. And while those researchers did succeed in editing the targeted defect, it also produced unintended defects elsewhere in the embryos' DNA.

The scientists who conducted the new experiments say they think they avoided those problems by injecting CRISPR at the same time the eggs were being fertilized by sperm.

"That was key," Mitalipov says.

Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin, dismissed concerns about the work leading to designer babies.

"This is not the dawn of the era of the designer baby," says Charo, who co-chaired a committee formed by the National Academies of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine to determine whether such experiments should be permissible. The committee concluded earlier this year that gene editing of human embryos could be allowed in rare cases when no other options are available — but only to treat diseases.

"I do not think that the constant drumbeat about the fear of designer baby is warranted, Charo says. "What this is, is a possible step toward being able to edit the DNA in human embryos that's reliable and precise."

In the meantime, scientists in Britain have won approval to use CRISPR to edit the DNA in healthy human embryos to learn more about normal human development. A team in Sweden has started similar experiments.

"I think this needs to be tightly regulated," says Fredrik Lanner, a geneticist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm who is conducting those experiments. "This is very exciting. But it also could be a double-edged sword. So I think we really have to be extra cautious with this technology."

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We start the show today with some big news from the world of science. For the first time, scientists have figured out how to reliably and safely edit the genes of human embryos. This has the potential to one day prevent genetic diseases from Alzheimer's to breast cancer. NPR health correspondent Rob Stein is in the studio to talk more. Hey there, Rob.

ROB STEIN, BYLINE: Oh, hey, Audie.

CORNISH: So help us understand how you edit (laughter) an embryo. What does that mean?

STEIN: Yeah, so as you said, this is the first time that scientists have ever actually deliberately made changes in the DNA inside a human embryo. And what that means is they actually went in, and they rewrote the letters in the genetic code in some of 3 billion letters that make up our entire genetic blueprint. You can kind of think of it as a computer programmer going into your computer to rewrite the code in your word processors to maybe debug it or something like that.

And you know, as you can imagine, this is generating both a lot of excitement and a lot of concerns. And you know, both scientists and critics of this work are saying this could be kind of a watershed moment in science. And the reason for that is if scientists can edit the DNA in human embryos, they could find ways to cure, you know, infertility, prevent miscarriages and birth defects. And they could maybe someday figure out a way to prevent a long list of some really terrible diseases, as you mentioned - you know, everything from Huntington's disease to sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis and even maybe some forms of cancer - breast and ovarian cancer. But critics say this opens kind of a Pandora's Box of all kinds of scary scenarios of everything - things like, you know, designer babies and genetically modified human beings.

CORNISH: But the keyword there is probably some day. This is still the experimental phase, right?

STEIN: Oh, absolutely. This is a team of scientists - some scientists from California and Oregon in the United States. They teamed up with some scientists from China and South Korea. And the first thing I should make clear is they did not make genetically modified babies or do anything even close to that. All they're trying to do is figure out a way to prevent some of these diseases that plague families.

So what they did is they created embryos in their lab using eggs that were donated from women. They fertilized them with sperm from a man who was carrying a genetic defect for a potentially fatal form of heart problem. And then they use this new genetic editing technique. It's got a funny name. It's called CRISPR. And they injected it into the embryos. And you can kind of think of it as sort of like nanosurgery. They actually spliced out the defective gene from these embryos.

CORNISH: And this isn't the first time researchers have tried something like this - right? - though not in the U.S.

STEIN: Yeah, that's right. There were some scientists in China who tried this sort of thing, and it really didn't work very well. They edited the genes kind of, but they didn't do it a lot most of the time. And it ended up kind of messing up the DNA in other places in the embryos' genetic code. And what these scientists are saying is they hit their target, hit their target almost all the time.

In 70 percent of the cases, they were able to knock out this mutant gene. And they think the key was - is that they injected this editing tool just as the egg was being fertilized by the sperm. And the embryo seems to have been able to sort of fix itself and repair the damage. And that's something scientists didn't know embryos could do before, so it opens up all kinds of possibilities.

CORNISH: So what more needs to happen before there is real-world application?

STEIN: Yeah, so the scientists acknowledge that they have, you know, years of work to do to first of all confirm that they really did this and did it safely and efficiently and to see if it works as well as they think it does. And in this country, they face some really big hurdles, you know? The National Institutes of Health won't fund any kind of research that involves human embryos because that's controversial. And the Food and Drug Administration has been prohibited by Congress from even considering any experiments like this.

But the scientists say they're determined to push forward, and they might, like, do some more work overseas, like in the United Kingdom, for example, where the government is much more willing to approve these kinds of experiments. And there already is related research underway. There are some experiments like this going on in Sweden and in, as I mentioned, in China.

CORNISH: So in the meantime, what about their peers? How are people reacting in the community?

STEIN: Scientists are really excited, but the critics say this is terrible and very dangerous.

CORNISH: That's NPR health correspondent Rob Stein. Thank you.

STEIN: Sure. Nice to be here. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.