CRISPR is about to change everything.

This gene editing technology is so precise, so flexible, and so accurate that the sky’s the limit for  what scientists can do with it. The first CRISPR-based gene therapies are already on the market helping people with blood disorders.

Which is great, but researchers are just getting started. Like, curing disease? Think bigger.

Way bigger. CRISPR has the potential to improve our lives in more ways than you can imagine. If biology even comes near it, you can CRISPR it.

Let’s look at a few ways, starting from almost-ready-to-go, and working our way up to pie-in-the-sky. [intro] As a quick recap, CRISPR refers to a  family of gene editing technologies. Scientists can direct CRISPR anywhere in the genome, and when there, it can deactivate a gene or add in new genetic information, depending on what type you’re using. Some kinds even do something other than editing, like delivering cargo to a specific sequence.

And the result is the ability to rewrite genes with almost complete freedom. Here’s what we can do with that. First up is solving the organ transplant shortage.

In the United States alone, there are over 100,000 people on organ wait lists, hoping to find a match for a needed kidney, liver, lung, or heart. Even if you’re lucky enough to get a new organ, it won’t last forever. Transplanted organs are good for maybe fifteen to twenty years, and that’s with a constant course of immunosuppressive drugs to prevent rejection.

That’s because there are a  ton of little differences between individual humans that our immune systems can recognize and will try to get rid of. To address that, we can use CRISPR to create better-matched organs. Not from humans, but from pigs.

A 2023 paper reported on a successful method to prepare a pig kidney for transplant. Researchers made 69 different genetic edits with CRISPR technology to improve the chances of getting an organ from a totally different  animal to stick in a human. Some of the edits removed pig specific genes, while other edits added more human-like features.

Still others deactivated zombie  viruses in the pig genome. Two people have received such a kidney. One man passed away two months  after receiving his new kidney, but not from organ complications.

Another woman had the transplanted  pig kidney removed - again, not from transplant rejection, but from blood flow problems that damaged the organ’s functioning. Editing animal organs to be more human-compatible has two huge bonuses: one, it could create a supply of organs that greatly reduces organ  transplant wait list times and, and two, it could reduce the need for so many of those immunosuppressive drugs. But as you can probably tell, although there have been a few human tests, this one isn’t quite ready to go.

Doctors and scientists are still  carefully making improvements to safety and effectiveness before this can become widely available to more people. Still, we started with the tamest  thing CRISPR might revolutionize, so let’s keep going. CRISPR could also give us more  effective cancer medications.

Since cancer is basically a  disease of genes gone wrong, it’s no surprise that biomedical researchers are pursuing gene editing with CRISPR as a fix. I mean, this almost ended  up being the whole episode, given how many different  approaches CRISPR enables. Some researchers are working on an approach to eliminate dangerous growth-promoting  genes from tumor cells.

And because we know some specific genes are risk factors for cancer development, like BRCA1 and 2 for breast cancer, we could target those  genetic sequences for repair. Other researchers are instead trying to improve how your  immune cells respond to cancers to make them better at like naturally  finding and fighting tumors. CRISPR could even be used  to introduce instructions for making cancer-killing agents  directly at the site of the tumor.

Now, many of these methods are still in preclinical development, meaning they aren’t ready for testing in humans or approved for use. But there’s also an impressive number  of CRISPR-devised cancer therapies already in human clinical trials, testing a variety of those approaches in a huge number of cancer types. In almost all these studies, the biggest concern isn’t necessarily the effectiveness of treating the cancer -- but it's making sure the  CRISPR edits are on-target.

Off-target effects, or edits made in the wrong part of the genome or even the wrong type of cells, and they could hold all sorts of risks. But because CRISPR is incredibly precise, it has a better shot at pulling it off than any gene editing technology that came before. Of course, curing disease is great, but we’re shooting for the moon here.

Our next couple of examples show how CRISPR could tackle the climate crisis. Okay, okay, you can’t genetically edit the climate itself But climate does affect  the plants we grow and eat, and making sure they can  weather the climate crisis means we’ll stay fed. Extreme weather events, like long droughts or severe storms, are becoming more common.

That’s on top of shifting rainfall  and temperature patterns - none of which are good for farmers  trying to maximize crop growth. Now, humans have been  engineering plant performance since the dawn of agriculture. It’s just that we did it the old-fashioned  way, with selective breeding.

And even though genetic engineering  of plants is already a thing, CRISPR has the potential to  really speed up that process – and keep us all fed as the climate crisis rages. The first way is to make plants more tolerant to hostile soil conditions. Depending on the crop and geography, that could be soil that’s too damp, too dry, or just too nutrient poor.

Since crops are bred for yield, and with climate change impacting  seasonal growing conditions, ensuring hardy crops is going to be key to preventing failures due  to drought, for example. Over a short period of time, a plant can deal with drought by closing the pores in its  leaves to prevent water loss. It can also put less energy into growing leaves and focus instead on roots, in the hopes of running into more water.

Drought tolerant plants, however, have genes that protect them  from getting as stressed by limited water in the first place. Drought tolerant plants produce more antioxidants, which help to fight cellular damage and stress. They also produce compounds that help the plant retain the water it does have.

And using CRISPR to tinker with pathways like those could be a way to make crops even more tolerant of dry spells. Studies in rice varieties are helping  to identify which specific genes are best for helping to survive those conditions. CRISPR could likewise help plants deal with soil that’s too wet, or too salty, or otherwise contains the wrong mix of chemicals.

A second way CRISPR could boost agriculture is by tapping into the genes that make fruits and veggies tasty and healthy. Again, researchers are adjusting the enzymes in rice to make it more palatable. Boosting production of amylose, a type of starch, makes rice that cooks up nice and soft and sticky.

Other enzymes that occur naturally  in certain rice varieties make them more fragrant - and CRISPR has been used here too to boost the production of the compound that gives jasmine rice its signature smell. Tomatoes and bananas have also been targeted for improvements in taste and nutrient quality. The barrier to these agricultural  applications, though, is arguably less about technical feasibility, and more about regulation and consumer acceptance.

Not everybody’s crazy about  genetically modified foods. Although, depending on where you live, it might not count as a GMO if researchers don’t introduce any outside DNA. So you could switch an  existing gene off using CRISPR and it wouldn’t get the GMO  label in some countries.

Instead, those CRISPR-modified plants would get counted the same as other selectively bred varieties. We’re even starting to see these foods on supermarket shelves, and CRISPR advances aren’t limited to the produce aisle. Japan has already approved the sale of fish with their myostatin gene disabled by CRISPR.

Turning off this gene means more muscle growth, and therefore more meat. We already select for beefier animals via regular breeding in all  sorts of farmed species. CRISPR literally just speeds up the process.

Speaking of faster, biofuel production is another area where CRISPR editing could make it possible to  improve what we’ve already got. The biomanufacture of ethanol  starts with simple crop sugars, an easily renewable resource. And we do use microbes to produce ethanol, but it can be an inefficient process that produces too many by-products to be an economical replacement for petroleum.

But if we optimized the enzymatic  activity of these bacteria, we could really boost the adoption of ethanol and similar petroleum alternatives. However, biofuel production also  often requires high temperatures that most bacteria aren’t really fond of. And temperature tolerance is a complex trait driven by multiple genes.

This is where CRISPR comes in. One idea is to use thermophiles - bacteria that already thrive  at extreme temperatures - and modify them to process  organic matter into ethanol. Alternatively, we could replicate  those heat-tolerant genes in more commonly used bacteria strains.

Researchers tend to favor the second approach – putting beneficial genes into the strains we already use. Heat shock proteins, for example, are important for heat tolerance. These molecular helpers are upregulated  when a cell is heat-stressed and can stabilize proteins that might otherwise unfold at higher-than-usual temperatures.   In fact, CRISPR has already  been much more effective than other editing techniques in souping up the bacterial strains we use for ethanol production.

This route is preferable because doing your editing  work at normal temperatures is so much easier than working with bacteria that only live at temperatures hotter than your average petri dish. What’s more, because thermophiles are adapted to dealing with stressful conditions, they tend to be slightly better at DNA repair and they more naturally resist attempts at even CRISPR-introduced edits. Either way, it’s still a work in progress.

And this last entry is probably even further from widespread implementation – but it could happen, and it sure would be cool. Ethanol isn't the only thing bacteria can produce. PHA is a kind of polyester fiber and a much greener alternative to the kind of plastics found  in water and soda bottles.

You see, if you feed certain bacteria  a diet over-rich in carbon nutrients, they'll just naturally produce this bioplastic. We just need a way to make it cheaper to produce than oil-based synthetic plastics. And CRISPR could do just that by targeting the right metabolism genes.

Just like for ideal ethanol production, the bacteria that produce PHA need to survive on the right  mix of a simple food source, produce a lot of the desired PHA compound, and create minimal waste. Labs are already at work to identify the genes critical for PHA production, in a variety of bacterial strains. And The latest studies demonstrate protocols for clean edits and improved productivity, although we're still a ways away from efficiency on an industrial scale.

So there you have it. CRISPR is such a powerful tool it has the potential to address problems you’d never associate with genetic engineering. It’s not the only thing that’s  going to fix the climate crisis, but it’s kind of amazing that it can help so many problems. [ OUTRO ]