Tag Archives: CRISPR

At the turn of the century a difficult ethical dilemma raged: on the one hand researchers could vastly speed up their work in leading edge medicine and cure of several ailments by using stem cells, on the other hand harvesting stem cells from embryo meant killing the embryo (or doing …

Peter Diamandis in the nice to read “20 technology and exponential Megatrends” published in Abundance 360° as well as the MIT Emerging technologies 2023 include the evolution of CRISPR as a game changing technology for this and the coming decades. Peter makes a more general claim on CRISPR in its …

Using CRISPR – Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats- to change the instructions coded in genes has become as normal to bio-engineers as the screwdriver is to mechanical engineers. The modification of the gene code has opened the door to fixing (or at least attenuating) a number of genetic diseases. …

Getting old has always been considered as unavoidable (unless you die young!). In the last decades, however, a number of scientists and entrepreneurs have started to look at old age as something that can be avoided. The World Health Organisation -WHO- is now planning to change the diagnoses of “senility” …

CRISPR – Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats- as become an invaluable tools for bioengineers, allowing them to cut, add, replace any string of DNA (and more recently RNA) to meet specific needs. Basically what they do is to alter a DNA sequence so that it will instruct the cell …

As conclusion to my talk in the MediRes AI Program I spoke about the future of Healthcare. Of course it is a very broad subject and my focus was on the use of Digital Twins and Personal Digital Twins. I came up with the circle diagram shown in the picture. Healthcare …

It has already happened in Jurassic Park, but that was through computer created artefacts. The idea of using a genome retrieved from fossil remains to re-create that beast is, so far at least, in the science fiction domain, far away from science. This does not mean that researchers are not …

The discovery of the DNA first and the sequencing of the human genome have created huge expectation for a future where it would be possible to radically cure/stop genetic diseases (and there are over 6,000 genetic disorders already identified). Clearly the first step is to understand what might be wrong …

Molecular robotics The progress of technology that allows us to manipulate the DNA, CRISPR and others, is allowing researcher to create DNA that can serve specific purposes, outside of its usual cell environment where it is used to create copy of mRNA that are used by the cell to build …

Computational Biology As remarked in the previous posts on Synthetic Biology, this is an area where no progress would be possible without the support of computers and AI. More than that: in the last few years progress has been fostered by computational approaches to the point of creating a new …