A scientific team at the West China Hospital in Sichuan, China in August will perform the world's first human clinical trials of the revolutionary gene editing tool called CRISPR-Cas-9 that makes gene editing much easier.

West China Hospital, the largest hospital in China with a 4,300 bed capacity, is part of Sichuan University in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province.

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The Chinese team plans to edit genes so they can to turn off a gene that encodes for a protein that slows an immune response and by so doing treat patients with lung cancer.

China has been a leader in advancing CRISPR technology in human beings, and Chinese scientists were the first to use the technique to on human embryos.

The team, which will be led Dr. Lu You, an oncologist at West China Hospital, plans to start testing cells modified with CRISPR on patients with lung cancer in August. CRISPR-Cas-9 will be tried on patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

The human trials at West China Hospital won't edit the germ-line so its effects won't be hereditary.

The Chinese team intends to retrieve T cells from patients with incurable lung cancer and then edit the genes in those cells. They will disable a gene that encodes for a protein called PD-1 that prevents an immune response to help prevent cancer attacks on healthy cells.

After passing strict quality checks, the cells will be allowed to multiply and will be injected back into the same patient's bloodstream. The hope is the edited cells will cause the patient's immune system to mount a more aggressive attack on tumor cells, killing them and curing the patient.

Thirty candidates have been chosen but only one will receive the edited cells initially in a three dose regimen. That patient will be monitored very closely for both positive and negative responses.

CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a revolutionary gene editing technology that can find, remove and replace specific parts of DNA using a specially programmed enzyme named Cas9. Japanese scientists in 1987 were the first to discover CRISPR in the DNA of bacteria.

On the other hand, the technique called CRISPR/Cas9 was invented in 2012 by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley. CRISPR/Cas9 allows scientists and geneticists to edit DNA with precision and relative ease. It offers great promise in the treatment of cancer.

CRISPR/Cas9 involves CRISPR, a Cas protein called Cas9, and hybrid RNA that can be programmed to identify, cut and replace any gene sequence. CRISPR can also be used in almost any type of cell, animal embryos and human stem and immune cells.

TagsCRISPR-Cas-9, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, Cancer, Dr. Lu You, CRISPR