CRISPR-Cas9 is a gene-editing mechanism derived from a naturally-occurring set of DNA sequences found in bacteria. While still in its infancy, the technology has garnered a lot of attention in the past few years due to its accuracy and flexibility, as well as its relatively-low cost. You can even buy your own CRISPR-Cas9 kit for a few hundred dollars and use it to modify DNA in almost any way possible.
From pest-resistant crops to designer babies to permanently curing ailments like cancer, one can only imagine the things that can be done with a technology like that, especially in the hands of skilled researchers who know what they’re doing.
10. Edit Food
Improving yields and nutritional values of existing food crops is a major challenge of the future, owing to factors like climate change and an ever-growing human population. While CRISPRisn’t the only technique aimed at solving it, it’s one of the most promising, as it provides gene-editing access to small and independent growers around the world.
While it’d be a while before you start seeing entirely new fruits and vegetables made by CRISPR at your local supermarket, it’s not too far into the future, either. One can already buy some varieties of fruits and vegetables modified with CRISPR in some places around the world, with many more experimental varieties on the way.
There are still some ethical issues around what should and shouldn’t be edited – especially regarding more complex food sources like animals. To solve them, countries around the world are working on various types of regulations to oversee gene editing for food, which should make it safer and more reliable for mass production and consumption.
9. Eradicate Malaria
Malaria is one of the deadliest ongoing insect-borne diseases around the world, killing hundreds of thousands of people in an average year, especially in the high-risk tropical and subtropical regions of Africa. CRISPR provides one of the many permanent solutions to the problem, as it could be used to design something called a gene drive, which could then modify the entire mosquito gene pool to drop the disease altogether.
Obviously, it’s not as easy as it sounds, though early experiments have been promising. In a recent study, researchers from various institutions in the UK and Italy did something similar to a population of Anopheles gambiae – the mosquito species responsible for the highest number of cases in sub-Saharan Africa. The CRISPR modification resulted in the complete annihilation of the target group within a year, proving that it could be done. While it’s still far from the complete eradication of the disease, as that’d require replicating the experiment on a much larger scale, it’s definitely a step in the right direction.
8. Biofuel
Coming up with clean, sustainable ways of generating energy would be a major problem in the future, if it already isn’t. Biofuels are a promising solution, as they’re naturally-occuring and leave a minimal footprint on the environment. It’s difficult to mass produce them, though, especially at the scales of production we’re talking about.
CRISPR provides a possible fix, as it allows researchers to come up with new ways of modifying the genome of natural biofuels. It’s a growing area of research, where multiple teams are looking at different ways of implementing the CRISPR protocol into the biofuel production process. Early experiments with some types of biofuels – like microalgae – have been successful, where researchers were able to change DNA of a few known microalgae species using CRISPR-Cas9 editing.
7. CAMERA1
CAMERA1 is a new technology built by a team of scientists from Harvard and MIT. Using the CRISPR sequence, it modifies cells into a kind of black box recorder that can record changes at the DNA level, which could then be used to track the origins of a range of genetic features. Recording these variations in real time could one day allow us to understand the root causes of long-term diseases like cancer, as CAMERA1 is perhaps the first technology that gives us a real-time window into the complete life cycle of a cell.
The possibilities are endless, though much like all other CRISPR techniques right now, CAMERA1 is still in its early stages. Like CRISPR, it could also be used as a base to build other applications in the future.
6. DETECTR
Like CAMERA, DETECTR uses CRISPR technology to come up with an entirely-new application of its own. Designed as a detection tool for any kind of genetic information you feed into it, DETECTR could soon prove to be a revolutionary tool for early detection of serious diseases.
In one experiment, DETECTR was deployed to detect the HPV virus – a known possible cause for cervical cancer – among other random types of viral strains, and it proved to be quite good at it. The same technique could be further developed to detect the early signs of diseases like Alzheimer’s, or even cancer. DETECTR has also been successfully used to develop an accurate method for the detection of Covid, which could be handy during future outbreaks.
5. Fix Chronic Pain
According to the CDC, about 50 million people in the USA alone suffer from some sort of chronic pain, and it usually tends to get worse with advancing age. Surprisingly, modern medicine offers few reliable cures for it, even if it’s a major, everyday problem for those suffering from it.
CRISPR provides a possible long-term solution, as it could be used to modify the genetic structure of the affected area and permanently reduce pain. A few researchers at the University of Utah have come up with a way to switch specific genes on or off, using it to disable the inflammation mechanism that causes chronic pain in cases of disk strain. The technique is still in its early phases and there are a lot of regulatory hurdles before it’s fully realized, though the researchers are confident that it won’t be longer than 10 – 15 years before it’s widely used to treat debilitating conditions that cause lasting chronic pain.
4. Cure HIV/AIDS
The HIV epidemic is easily one of the longest-running disease outbreaks of all time, with an estimated total death count of about 40 million till now. The pathogen – a type of retrovirus – has so far proven to be resistant to any type of cure. We don’t even understand how the HIV virus functions, really, especially the mechanism it uses to infect and spread among human cells.
It seems like an incurable disease, though CRISPR provides one potential way it could be eradicated. One team of researchers from Northwestern University in Illinois has used the technology to identify the genes associated with an HIV infection, which could eventually be disabled to permanently reduce the worst effects of the virus.
The team is planning to eventually isolate every cellular and genetic factor responsible for an HIV infection, hoping to one day eradicate the disease that still affects more than 1.5 million people globally.
3. Antibiotic Resistance
Antibiotic resistance is a major problem for healthcare providers. Due to the proliferation of almost every kind of antibiotic imaginable, pathogens are increasingly growing resistant to known drugs , as antibiotics turn them into super varieties of everyday diseases. According to a Lancet report, in 2019 alone, antibiotic-resistant diseases may have led to more than 5 million deaths worldwide, making it one of the leading causes of death in general.
While there aren’t any quick-fix solutions to the multi-faceted, growing problem of antibiotic-resistant pathogens, CRISPR could offer a few long-term solutions. For one, a team of scientists from Canada recently turned off antibiotic-resistant genes inside specific types of bacteria during one of their studies, only it was done on mice instead of human subjects. Other efforts in the same direction involve something called bacteriophages – a type of virus that infects bacteria – which could be modified using CRISPR to attack the antibiotic-resistant regions of harmful pathogens and render them harmless.
2. Resurrect Extinct Animals
Bringing animals back from the dead may not always be as cool as it sounds, as the Jurassic Park franchise adequately proves, though it may have its uses. If it could be done, the idea can allow us to study – and maybe even repopulate the planet with – long-extinct species, and may even open the door for further research into the higher arts of human resurrection.
Many teams are working on it, though none have truly been able to resurrect a dead species yet. A major problem is the availability of the entire genome of the said species, which is required to do any kind of CRISPR editing. One American geneticist, George Church, is confident that his team can resurrect the woolly mammoth by 2027, as they’re currently identifying all the traits that separate mammoth species from the elephants we have now, which could then be used to replicate it on the DNA level.
1. Hack The Human DNA
For the first time ever, CRISPR has allowed independent researchers to tinker with the building blocks of life itself, raising many ethical and moral questions along the way. It’s obvious that once this technology is really out of the bag, it’d inevitably be used to do the unthinkable – modifying the human genome itself.
It’s possible that within our lifetimes, scientists would be able to control a wide variety of human genetic expressions with CRISPR, including resistance to specific diseases, facial features, athleticity, intelligence, or really any other feature we assume to be natural. It’s a matter of ethics at this point, really, as the technology largely already exists. In China, especially, a few experiments have proven the viability of CRISPR-aided modifications to the human genome, and the results have been promising, too.