Rare Daily Staff
The National Institutes of Health said it is launching an effort to remove barriers that slow the adoption of genome editing for treating patients.
The program, Somatic Cell Genome Editing, plans to award researchers approximately $190 million over six years beginning this year, pending availability of funds. These researchers will collaborate to improve the delivery mechanisms for targeting gene editing tools in patients, develop new and improved genome editors, develop assays for testing the safety and efficacy of the genome editing tools in animal and human cells. The resulting knowledge will be used to assemble a genome editing toolkit with tools and methods to be shared with the scientific community.
“Genome editing technologies such as CRISPR/Cas9 are revolutionizing biomedical research,” said NIH Director Francis Collins,. “The focus of the Somatic Cell Genome Editing program is to dramatically accelerate the translation of these technologies to the clinic for treatment of as many genetic diseases as possible.”
Many rare diseases, as well as some common disorders, are caused by changes in a person’s DNA, either through changes inherited from parents or those that occur during a person’s lifetime. Advances in genome editing made over the past decade now make it possible to precisely change the DNA code inside living cells.
Despite widespread interest and investment in this field, many challenges remain preventing broad adoption of this technology in the clinic.
Somatic cells are any of the non-reproductive cells of the body—the cells that do not pass DNA down to the next generation. By focusing on somatic cells, any changes to the DNA introduced by the genome editing therapeutics will not be inherited.
NIH said it expects to issue funding opportunity announcements for this program within a month. More information can be found on the NIH website. https://commonfund.nih.gov/editing.
January 23, 2018
Photo: NIH Director Francis Collins
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