Researchers are having a bet they could with CRISPR, an effective technology that allows scientists to quickly target, delete and repair any mutated series of DNA in any gene. This CRISPR technology has the potential of changing medicine  For so long as he ought to remember, Razel Colón had recognized pain. It ripped down his neck and back, shot via his legs, and traveled directly to his feet, frequently leaving him writhing and incapacitated. He suffered occasional assaults of “acute chest,” wherein breathing unexpectedly will become difficult. “It felt like an elephant become sitting on my chest, with tight, tight pain,” Colón tells me. Trips to the emergency department and the hospital had been commonplace. “If I was lucky,” he says, “I could stay away for a month.”

Colón, from Hoboken, N.J., is simply 19, however, the sickle cell disease that produced those results has been a constant if unwelcome, companion. But he tells his tale now from the perspective of one who has long gone a year and a half without that pain. He can do matters that formerly had been out of the question: play basketball, raise weights, swim in bloodless water. His treatment, says his long-time doctor Stacey Rifkin-Zenenberg, a pediatric hematologist-oncologist at Hackensack University Medical Center, “changed him from having the disease to being a carrier.” Colón’s case represents a point at the curve of an emerging generation that can for all time modify our technique to treating diseases like sickle molecular. That global, the modern global of progressive genomic healing procedures, is over again withinside the midst of explosive change—and designer DNA lies on the heart of the conversation.

This is bold new territory. Some strategies, such as gene therapy, had been to be had for some time, which include the ability to genetically modify cells so one can produce a therapeutic effect—that is, to add a corrected gene into the genome so one can try and treat sickness. This has the capability of changing medicine Traditionally, viruses had been used to deliver healthy genes into cells, but the beyond decade has been witness to profound change. Multiple gene healing procedures had been permitted to deal with quite a few conditions: squamous molecular skin cancer, a rare form of inherited blindness, melanoma, blood disorders, and so on.