Noubar Afeyan: prediction

Transcript context

…Fifteen years from now, how will CRISPR make people’s lives better? I don’t know if CRISPR will be the particular technique that’s used 15 years from now, to be honest, because I think CRISPR, like many other things, is a step along a series of innovations that will go beyond that. By that, I mean the particulars of the enzymes that are bacterially derived that have been repurposed to edit one or two letters. I think that the next step beyond that will be — and you could imagine we’re already working on it — we worked on CRISPR. We were one of the founding groups that was involved in the formation of Editas, but we’re now moving on to gene writing and literally inserting words and sentences into the genome, not just spelling mistakes. If you think of CRISPR as a metaphoric CRISPR — the ability to do things with the genome, I think 15 years from now, we will see multiple rare genetic conditions that are addressed by and corrected by it during somebody’s life, as opposed to in the conception phase, which is all another ethical issue. I think that will be done. It’ll be more precise. It’ll be more pervasive. But I think there’ll be plenty of other ways that will compete, by the way, with the end result, which often is, “I need a corrected form of a protein. I don’t really care if I get it from my DNA being altered, or I get a virus that can safely coexist with my cells so that it keeps making what I need.” Or RNA . . . One of the things that we’ve got to realize is that in this field, it’s not winner take all, at all. It takes too long. It takes too much money to then say, “and once I’ve done it, I own the field.” It’s different than the tech sector where the competition is around execution and . . . Here, I think there could be multiple approaches that can be taken forward and are being taken forward, and they’ll all exist. When will the mRNA platform repair someone’s damaged or bruised heart, for instance?…

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