There are many ways in which CRISPR can be directly beneficial to our health.
We will discuss some of them.
One of the biggest health issues today, is bacteria becoming resistant to many antibiotics.
According to WHO- the World Health Organisation:
Antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats, to global health, food security, and development.
We use antibiotics in health care and farming, to fight infections.
Antibiotics fight bacteria in different ways.
They could block the ability of bacteria to reproduce, or attack their cell walls.
Bacteria are incredibly good at mutating.
Some of the mutations are capable of resisting antibiotics.
Once a mutations is successful in resisting antibiotics, it spreads like lightning.
It looks like we are in a arms race with bacteria.
Scientists are working to develop CRISPR in a pill form.
Pill carries DNA messages that insert themselves into the bacteria genetic code,
and tells it to destroy itself.
Once this technology is developed, it has the potential to fight drug resistant bacteria.
Humans have been changing plants and animals for millennia.
This is how we have high yield corn and dogs.
Recently we started genetically modifying crops, by introducing selective DNA.
This is similar to selective breeding of a particular type of dog.
CRISPR speeds up this process, and also makes it more precise.
Scientists can also carry out multiple edits at the same time.
For example, CRIPSR enables to create the complex changes required to make a crop, drought resistant.
The demand for food is estimated to increase by 100% in the next 30 years,
when the world's population would be around 10 billion.
CRISPR could be of tremendous use to make this possible.
CRISPR can be used to identify diseases, at an early stage.
It can be used to identify diseases like Zika, Dengue, etc,..
By analysing blood and saliva, we can look for and identify multiple diseases at the same time.
This kind of screening can detect illness at a very early stage.
This will be of enormous use in preventive health care.
More than ten thousand diseases are related to mutations of a single gene.
Many of these diseases are hereditary.
They are very difficult to identify and treat in time.
CRISPR has the potential to deal with such diseases.
The lower price of CRISPR makes it viable to develop to cure the diseases,
where R&D costs are high, or the number of sufferers are low.
CRISPR has the potential to treat cancer, which kills millions of people.
Cancer often attacks T cells in the body, which is part of our immune system.
Cancer can mock out the T cells, and slow down the immune response.
This helps it to grow and spread.
Scientists are now working to find out whether the T cells can be reprogrammed,Â
to resist the cancer and even to fight it.