CRISPR/Cas9 a fantastic voyage to existing medical and agriculture modalities?

Very shortly a CRISPR-based drug will be approved. If approved, it would treat a pair of rare and deadly blood diseases and will cure millions.

- Monica Jolly

It is very likely that we will heard about the use of CRISPR technology and its great potential for addressing human health issues, as well as it holds the promise for providing solutions for major agricultural challenges. The invention of CRISPR-Cas gene editing in the last decade brought a great revolution in biology, providing researchers a way to make selective and precise changes to an organism's genetic code. CRISPR/Cas9 is undoubtedly one of the greatest scientific advancements of the last 100 years. In 2012, Jennifer Doudna and Emanuelle Charpentier published a peer-reviewed paper discussing the use of CRISPR/CasQ in gene editing. They had just democratised gene editing and changed biotechnology for years to come. The cost also tends to go down significantly with time, as we've seen with numerous molecular biology tools, and CRISPR is no exception. Recent the publications on CRISPR/Cas9 grew over 1000-fold over the last 10 years. Scientists opined it as a new gene editing technology called CRISPR to create genetic mutations in a more subtle way which is faster and cheaper than earlier techniques. It's different from a classical GMO in that we're not adding a genome from another organism,” Gmitter says. In CRISPR we are knocking out a few existing genes. In 2020, both Doudna and Charpentier won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of the genetic scissors. This, coupled with extensive media coverage, has made generalist and specialist investors alike very interested in CRISPR/Cas9 applications especially in the realm of therapeutics.