George Church: observation

Transcript context

…Is there an existing gene delivery mechanism which could deliver gene therapy to every single cell in the body? There is nothing close to that today. But there's nothing, no law of physics, that would prevent it. Again, there's going to be practical considerations, like how many injections do you need to do to achieve that goal? But we're getting better at targeting tissues. One of my companies, Dyno Therapeutics, showed they could get a hundredfold improvement in targeting neurons in the brain, which is a big deal. That was just one little campaign that they did. That one experiment involved a lot of AI and a lot of testing of millions of different capsids. Capsids are fairly limited in the diversity and the structure that it can change to. But cells have even more possibilities. I think you could probably get delivery to everything… The question is how close to 100% do you need to get? It's going to vary from tissue to tissue. For example, for some therapies you just need to get 1% because that 1% can produce some missing enzyme. And that 1% doesn't have to necessarily be in its normal place. You can turn a muscle into part of the immune system temporarily for a vaccine. An enzyme that's normally made in, let's say the brain, you could make in the liver, if the point is just to get it into the blood. So I think that's moving along quite well. You're one of the co-founders of Colossal which recently announced that they de-extincted a dire wolf. Now you're working on the woolly mammoth. Do you really think we're going to bring back a woolly mammoth? The difference between an elephant and a woolly mammoth might be like a million base pairs. How do we think about the kind of thing we're actually bringing back?…

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