Crispr Wins Key Approval to Fight Cancer in Human Trials
I'm calling it here, this trial will fail hard.<p>The basic idea is this: the cancer has a number of mutations that produce novel antigens that don't exist in normal cells. If we can train T-cells to recognize these, they can attack the tumor with great specificity and kill those cells.<p>The problem is, all the tumor has to do to evade this targeting is shed the problematic mutation, which is easily done - tumors are great at acquiring novel mutations to become resistance to therapy, losing a mutation is even easier. All you have to do is ditch one arm of a chromosome, revert the mutation, or otherwise eliminate the novel mutation, and your tumor cell is now resistant to this therapy.<p>Add to this the fact that we are basically shit at predicting which mutant proteins will produce neoantigens and you have a recipe for total failure, even in concept.