Category Archives: Human Genetic Engineering

Transparency Market Research Report Added "Genome Engineering Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2015 - 2023"

This press release was orginally distributed by SBWire

Albany, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 05/09/2017 -- Due to the presence of a small number of leading international players and few regional players, the competitive rivalry in the global genome engineering market is expected to remain moderate, reports Transparency Market Research in a new study. The market is dominated by three leading companies, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc., Sigma-Aldrich Corporation, and Sangamo Biosciences, Inc. These companies together accounted for 73.5% of the overall global revenue in 2014.

The emergence of small regional players in the genome engineering market has impelled the leading companies to focus on innovative product development. They are also focused on the development of differentiated products to maintain their lead in the global as well as regional markets. To produce innovative and technologically advanced products, companies are entering into agreements with research institutes and laboratories and investing in research and development projects.

Increasing Investments by Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Companies to Boost Adoption of Genome Engineered Techniques

With the emergence of new trends in the treatment of genetic diseases, pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms have realized the need for advanced gene editing technologies for detecting genetic anomalies. Leading firms are focusing on the mutation of cells to curb cell and genetic diseases. According to a TMR analyst, "To gain technology relating to gene editing, pharmaceutical companies are either investing in the ongoing projects of medical organizations or entering into a collaboration with them."

For instance, in October 2015, in order to develop treatments for human genetic disorders, Vertex Pharmaceuticals a cystic fibrosis drug maker, entered into an agreement with CRISPR Therapeutics, a gene editing tech company.

The increasing funding by governments and non-government organizations for genome research and technological advancements along with investments made by biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies is expected to boost the worldwide adoption of genome engineered techniques.

Rising Ethical Concerns Regarding Genetic Engineering to Hinder Industry Growth

Genetic engineering has been a topic for debate for years now after human germ-line alteration for medical purposes was considered unethical by several social, health, and religious organizations. The U.S. National Institute of Health has prohibited funding for genetic engineering of human embryos arguing against its need as it leads to complications in the human genes. Several social organizations have argued that the alteration in animal genes is likely to affect the genetic makeup of the coming generations of the animal along with reducing the lifespan of an individual genetically engineered animal.

Along with ethical issues, strict regulatory framework regarding the approval for genetically modifying a plant, human or animal genome are likely to impede the growth of the global genome engineering market.

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Use of Genome Engineering Technologies for Wide Range of Applications to Provide Lucrative Opportunities to Vendors

Genome engineering technologies are used for various applications such as in crop improvement. It has huge potential in homologous recombination for crop improvement in targeted gene replacement therapy. The companies operating in the global genome engineering market are focusing on capitalizing opportunities arising from the usage of genome engineering techniques in a wide range of applications. They are focusing on the modification of the existing technologies to meet the required standards of the various applications segments and gain advanced genome engineering technologies.

North America is expected to lead the global genome engineering market with revenues amounting to US$3.68 bn by the end of 2023. Cell line engineering is likely to maintain its lead among the applications segments with a revenue of US$3.32 bn by 2023.

With positive factors in dominance, the global genome engineering market is estimated to rise at a CAGR of 14.2% between 2015 and 2023. The global genome engineering market was valued at US$2.30 bn in 2015 and is estimated to touch a valuation of over US$7.21 bn by 2023.

The review is based on the findings of a TMR report titled," Genome Engineering Market: Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2015 - 2023."

About Transparency Market Research Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The company's exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMR's experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.

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Genome Engineering Market Is Gaining Momentum with the Introduction of the Latest Technological Developments - Digital Journal

STANFORD In the 1960s, when biologist Paul Ehrlich was predicting mass starvation due to rapid population growth, plant breeder Norman Borlaug was developing the new crops and approaches to agriculture that would become mainstays of the Green Revolution. Those advances, along with other innovations in agricultural technology, are credited with preventing more than a billion deaths from starvation and improving the nutrition of the billions more people alive today. Yet some seem eager to roll back these gains.

Beyond saving lives, the Green Revolution saved the environment from massive despoliation. According to a Stanford University study, since 1961, modern agricultural technology has reduced greenhouse-gas emissions significantly, even as it has led to increases in net crop yields. It has also spared the equivalent of three Amazon rainforests or double the area of the 48 contiguous US states from having to be cleared of trees and plowed up for farmland. Genetically engineered crops, for their part, have reduced the use of environmentally damaging pesticides by 581 million kilograms (1.28 billion pounds), or 18.5%, cumulatively since 1996.

Surprisingly, many environmentalists are more likely to condemn these developments than they are to embrace them, promoting instead a return to inefficient, low-yield approaches. Included in the so-called agroecology that they advocate is primitive peasant agriculture, which, by lowering the yields and resilience of crops, undermines food security and leads to higher rates of starvation and malnutrition.

Promoting that lunacy, the United Nations Human Rights Council recently published a report by Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Hilal Elver that called for a global agroecology regime, including a new global treaty to regulate and reduce the use of pesticides and genetic engineering, which it labeled human-rights violations.

The UNHRC a body that includes such stalwart defenders of human rights as China, Cuba, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela usually satisfies itself by bashing Israel. But in 2000, at the Cuban governments urging, it created the post of special rapporteur on the right to food. Befitting the UNHRCs absurd composition, the first person to fill the position, the Swiss sociologist Jean Ziegler, was the co-founder and a recipient of the Muammar al-Qaddafi International Human Rights Prize.

For her part, Elver has, according to UN Watch, cited works that claim the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were orchestrated by the United States government to justify its war on Muslims. Elvers position on food reflects the same paranoid mindset. She opposes industrial food production and trade liberalization, and frequently collaborates with Greenpeace and other radical environmentalists.

Much of Elvers new UNHRC report parrots the delusional musings of organic-industry-funded nongovernmental organizations. It blames agricultural innovations like pesticides for destabilizing the ecosystem and claims that they are unnecessary to increase crop yields.

This all might be dismissed as simply more misguided UN activism. But it is just one element of a broader and more consequential effort by global NGOs, together with allies in the European Union, to advance an agroecology model, in which critical farm inputs, including pesticides and genetically engineered crop plants, are prohibited. That agenda is now being promoted through a vast network of UN agencies and programs, as well as international treaties and agreements, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Codex Alimentarius Commission, and the International Agency on Research on Cancer.

The potential damage of this effort is difficult to overstate. The UNs Food and Agriculture Organization (which hasnt yet completely succumbed to radical activists) estimates that, without pesticides, farmers would lose up to 80% of their harvests to insects, disease, and weeds. (Consider, for example, the impact of the fall armyworm, which, in the last 18 months alone, has devastated maize crops across much of Sub-Saharan Africa.) Developing countries are particularly vulnerable to radical regulatory regimes, because foreign aid is often contingent on compliance with them, though they can also reshape agriculture in the developed world, not least in the EU.

Millions of smallholder farmers in the developing world need crop protection. When they lack access to herbicides, for example, they must weed their plots by hand. This is literally backbreaking labor: to weed a one-hectare plot, farmers usually women and children have to walk ten kilometers (6.2 miles) in a stooped position. Over time, this produces painful and permanent spinal injuries. Indeed, that is why the state of California outlawed hand-weeding by agricultural workers in 2004, though an exception was made for organic farms, precisely because they refuse to use herbicides.

Depriving developing countries of more efficient and sustainable approaches to agriculture relegates them to poverty and denies them food security. That is the real human-rights violation.

Go here to see the original:
The Right to Agricultural Technology - Project Syndicate

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Read more here:
Human Genetic Engineering on the Doorstep - hgalert.org

Researchers have established a startup business that could restore hearing that people have lost to construction, traffic, jet planes and even rock concerts.

Frequency Therapeutics, based in Farmington and Woburn, Mass., is developing drugs that would activate certain cells, stimulating the regrowth of hair cells in the inner ear to counter "chronic noise-induced hearing loss."

"The evolution of our hearing was not meant to hang out on subway platforms or put on earbuds or go to U2 concerts," said David Lucchino, chief executive officer of Frequency Therapeutics. "There's a disconnect between the evolution of hearing and the industrialized world we live in."

The company is part of the University of Connecticut's business incubation program, which aims to provide support to new business startups, and has received $32 million in financing. It is researching technology to develop a gel that would be injected in the middle ear between the eardrum and oval window in a doctor's office procedure of about 30 minutes.

The intent is to recreate sensory hair cells as many as 15,000 in each ear that act as antenna in converting sound into signals understood by the brain. Or as Lucchino says, how to "biologically hot-wire the inner ear" to help it regenerate itself.

The human ear is incapable of spontaneously restoring lost or damaged hair cells, making hearing loss permanent.

Jeff Karp, who co-founded Frequency Therapeutics in 2015, said "druggable tissue regeneration" has a broad platform, with hearing loss a first application.

Activating the body's progenitor cells known as descendants of stem cells that can form one or more kinds of cells in regenerating tissue also could be applied to treating skin disorders or reversing vision problems. By activating the progenitor cells, Frequency Therapeutics can prod disease modification without the complexity of genetic engineering.

Birds and amphibians, such as frogs, regenerate their hearing, which is critical for their survival. That observation prompted researchers to ask if the same can be done for humans, said Karp, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School's teaching affiliate, Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. "We knew the biology existed."

Lucchino said researchers looking to establish companies that will draw investment money consider ways to have the "biggest impact helping people." Finding a successful treatment for hearing loss would benefit a large market: About 36 million people in the U.S. are affected, researchers say.

The World Health Organization estimates that 1.1 billion young people are at risk for hearing loss from recreational noise. About 360 million people worldwide, or 5 percent of the global population, have disabling hearing loss. Of that, 32 million are children.

Hearing loss caused by prolonged exposure to excessive noise can be due to heavy construction or military training, but common loud noises like subways, concerts and the use of headphones can have a significant impact on hearing.

Genetic causes, complications at birth, certain infectious diseases, chronic ear infections, the use of particular drugs, exposure to excessive noise and aging also are blamed for hearing loss, according to the World Health Organization

The next step for Frequency Therapeutics is for researchers to move their work to the clinic, expected in the next year to 18 months, and "show this drug actually works," Lucchino said.

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Farmington Medical Startup Targets Hearing Loss With New Drugs - Hartford Courant

With the world population expected to reach nine billion by 2050, and with limited cultivable area on our planet, there is an increasing probability of droughts and mass famines in many countries.

Pakistan will be among those countries that will be most seriously affected by global warming. The spectacular advances in genomics in the last few decades offer some beacon of hope. The development of genetically-engineered crops will give increased yields, offer better nutrition and be resistant to diseases.

All the hereditary information in plants or animals is contained in their genes. Think of a tiny microscopic necklace (DNA) with many millions or billions of four different types of molecules known as nucleic acids arranged in it. It is the sequence in which these nucleic acids are arranged that determines everything about living organisms, such as the types and qualities of fruits that plants bear, the colour of our eyes, the structure of our hearts or brains, etc. The order in which these molecular beads are arranged is known as the genetic code. The first such code in humans to be unravelled was that of Prof Jim Watson in 2007. It cost about a million dollars and took years to accomplish. With faster sequencing machines now available, this can be done within a week at a cost of about $1,500 today.

A remarkable breakthrough has now been made by scientists at Imperial College, London. They have developed a microchip that can allow the sequencing to be done at an incredible speed the entire genome of 3.16 billion nucleic acids in human beings can be read and deciphered within minutes. The device in which the chip is incorporated reads the small changes in current as the molecular necklace passes through it. It is being scaled up so that it can read the sequence of molecules at a speed of 10 million molecules per second (compared to the present machines that can read the sequence at 10 molecules per second).

Another amazing development has been the identification of crime genes in hardened criminals. The presence of the gene restricts the formation of serotonin B2 receptor, and so affects the part of the brain that is responsible for restraint and foresight of the consequences of ones actions. The presence of the gene increases the predisposition to violence. However, all the people carrying the gene are not necessarily violent. Other psychological causes may also be responsible for violent behaviour.

A few years ago, researchers at Kings College London had identified certain genes that are responsible for the ageing process in human beings. They found that these genes are switched off and on by certain external factors, such as diet and the environment, and may hold the keys for living a longer and healthier life. The four key genes that affected the rate of healthy ageing and potential longevity were related to cholesterol, lung function and maternal longevity.

A research group at ETH Zurich discovered that when certain ageing genes are altered, the healthy lifespan of laboratory animals can be extended significantly. Efforts to achieve something similar in human beings are under way and many scientists believe that our children may be able to live up to the age of 120 years. In 2016, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved an anti-ageing drug trial. This was the first time the FDA recognised ageing as a new drug target

Over 200 million people are afflicted with malaria each year and nearly 800,000 deaths are recorded due to it every year. Over 90 percent of these deaths mostly of chidren occur in Sub-Saharan Africa. An exciting approach to tackle this disease is to develop genetically modified mosquitoes that can bring down the population of the harmful female variety. Anthony James, working at the University of California Irvine, has developed a genetically-modified variety of these female mosquitoes only. The genetic deformation prevents them from flying. The larvae hatch on water but the females cannot fly, and therefore die.

This approach of genetic genocide may ultimately help to reduce the populations of malaria-causing mosquitoes and save millions of lives. The advances made in the rapid sequencing of the human genome are leading to a greater understanding of the genetic causes of many human diseases. A whole new area of personalised medicine is also under rapid development. This will allow drugs to be tailored according to individual genetic make-up of different groups of populations.

An excellent centre for genetic engineering has now been established in Pakistan. The Jamil-ur-Rahman Centre for Genome Research built from my personal donation and named after my father is located in the International Centre for Chemical and Biological Sciences (ICCBS) in Karachi and is emerging as a centre of excellence. It is equipped with the state-of-the-art gene sequencing facilities the best in the country and is now deeply involved in health and agricultural research under the able leadership of the dynamic director of the ICCBS, Prof Iqbal Choudhary.

The rapid advances in genome sequencing technologies are opening up a whole new era of medicine. We need to develop our own research base to develop new genetically engineered varieties of food crops rather than relying on seeds imported from the West. This will also reduce the danger of us becoming completely dependent on foreign masters. Control the food chain within a country and you can control that country. This must not be allowed to happen in Pakistan. We need to invest massively in developing salt-tolerant and drought-resistant varieties of different crops through natural selection or through genetic engineering before we are engulfed by the challenges of famine and drought that surely lie ahead. Science must come to the rescue.

Countries that are investing in such advances are earning billions of dollars. For Pakistan to emerge from the shackles of poverty, we need to invest in science, technology, innovation. We also need to establish strong linkages between research and industry/agriculture. But the development budget of the Ministry of Science and Technology in Pakistan (about Rs1.8 billion only) is extremely low. Our investment in education is also low a little over two percent of our GDP ranking us among the bottom nine countries of the world.

We must realise that in order to develop, we must invest in top quality schools, colleges and universities so that we can transition to a strong knowledge-based economy. It is time to change directions and invest in our real wealth our children so that we too can stand with dignity in the comity of nations.

The writer is chairman of UN ESCAP Committee on Science Technology & Innovation and former chairman of the HEC. Email: [emailprotected]

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Amazing genetics - The News International

by Gretchen Bird, Cody Cook and Garrett Edinger

If you had the ability and unlimited resources, would you prevent Down syndrome among the worlds population? What about if your child had Down syndromewould you then take the initiative to turn off the extra chromosome that causes Down syndrome? Even further, if given the choice, would you select a particular eye color for your child? Hair color? Height? Athletic ability? Natural intelligence? With new technologies, the ability to select for these attributes is a possibility.

Recent advancements in biomedical technologies have brought us new ways of treating disease and improving human lives, some of which are described above. New technologies called CRISPR/Cas9 have made it possible for scientists to edit a humans genetic information in a precise and targeted way; however, these technologies have also raised many ethical concerns.

Matt Atherton explains CRISPR in the International Business Times, CRISPR is a gene-editing tool. It allows scientists to not only examine every single strand of DNA in an embryo, but also adapt them. It is an incredibly efficient and precise mechanism for targeting genes. The basis for the practice comes from bacteria.

With this new biomedical technology, it is possible for us to change the genetic information of a human. The question of whether or not we can edit DNA has been answered. Now we need to ask ourselves, examining our hearts and our motives, to see if we should. Proponents of human gene editing say that it can be used to remove heritable diseases from human genes and prevent congenital disease. Nevertheless, many people feel that editing heritable genes, or the human germline, would be unethical and potentially dangerous.

X-linked hypophosphatemia, or XLH, which results in a form of dwarfism, is one example of a genetic disease that scientists believe could be treated using CRISPR technologies. This would be accomplished by editing the DNA in the sperm and egg cells of parents who carry the genes for the disease. By removing the DNA that codes for the disease using CRISPR, sperm and egg cells from the parents could be produced that no longer code for the disease; these cells could then be used to accomplish in vitro fertilization. The parents would then have an XLH-free baby. Huntingtons disease, azoospermia, and certain inherited forms of cancer are just a few of the many genetic diseases that have been mentioned as potential applications of CRISPR. Theoretically, CRISPR could be used to treat any number of genetic and inherited diseases.

While many people feel that it would be irresponsible for us neglect a technology that has such great power to cure life-altering disease, others feel that it would be dangerous, and might result in a world where gene editing is used for more than treating disease. While many scientists agree that CRISPR could be used to treat disease, it also raises concerns of its less admirable uses. CRISPR could also be used to change aesthetic appearance. Everything from height, to hair color, to eye color, to body size, could be selected for using CRISPR. Moreover, these changes would most likely only be available to the very rich. CRISPR also presents the possibility that genes could be changed in unintended ways that doctors and scientists did not intend, especially if the changes are heritable.

Public opinion about the uses of new genetic modification tools is still much divided. According to an article by Antonio Regalado in MIT Technology Review, 50% of U.S. adults believe that changing a babys genetic characteristics to reduce the risk of serious disease is taking medical advances too far. Eighty-three percentsay it is taking medical advancements too far if it is used to increase a babys intelligence.

Although this technology is still in its infancy, it already presents us with many questions going forward. While it can improve lives, CRISPR could also change the world in ways that would alter society at the most fundamental level. It could create a world in which everyone is genetically modified for inconsequential aesthetic purposes, rather than for the sake of their health. Its effects would be felt far beyond any lab. Real people and real families are at the heart of what CRISPR can do, and we need to remember that it is their lives that would be affected most by this technology. We cannot forget that human dignity and value are defined independently of ones intellect, athleticism, or any other surface quality. As one mother of a child with Down syndrome stated to one of the scientists who helped develop CRISPR, Theres something about him [her child with Down syndrome] thats so special. Hes so loving in a way thats unique to him. I wouldnt change it.

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Genetic Engineering: We Can, But Should We? - Veritas News - Veritas News