Gene Editing: New Report from Third International Summit

This is a must-read document for students of bioethics, teachers, and practitioners. Here are the details:

NEW PROCEEDINGS OF A WORKSHOP—IN BRIEF

Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing: Expanding Capabilities, Participation, and Access

The proceedings of the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing, which took place on March 6-8, 2023 in London, are now available in a free PDF (readable and downloadable).

Building on previous events held in Washington, D.C. (2015) and Hong Kong (2018), the third summit examined scientific advances that have occurred since the previous summits and the need for global dialogue and collaboration on the safe and ethical application of human genome editing.

The first two days of the summit focused largely on somatic human genome editing, where the cells being altered are non-reproductive cells - as a result genetic changes cannot be passed on to future generations.

The third day of the summit broadened the discussion to include heritable human genome editing, in which genetic changes could be passed on to descendants.

The summit proceedings highlight the presentations and discussions of the event. 

The summit was organized by the UK Royal Society and Academy of Medical Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine, and UNESCO-The World Academy of Sciences for the advancement of science in developing countries (TWAS).  

For fogies like me, I assumed the conference would be all about CRISPR-Cas9 (the technique that garnered its co-inventors a Nobel Prize), but that gene-editing technique is yesterday's news:

The CRISPR-Cas9 system discovered by Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier is still a widely used tool in genome editing, but newer systems are even more powerful and precise. Techniques known as base editing and prime editing enable efficient and precise gene correction in a wide variety of cell types without requiring that both strands of the DNA molecule be broken, minimizing the possibility of DNA deletions, insertions, or rearrangements that can result from double-stranded DNA breaks. Many laboratories have used prime editing to treat diseases in animal models of human disease, and some of these techniques have been applied in clinical trials. [Proceedings, p. 4]

The ethical concerns, like the Dude, abide: accessibility and affordability of somatic gene editing, the lack of infrastructure and expertise in developing countries, the difficulty and complexity of determining the value of new therapies, the need to engage the public in sophisticated policy discussions, appropriate oversight of experiments, and probably the most polarizing topic of all: germline and heritable gene editing.