Crispr Wins Key Approval to Fight Cancer in Human Trials
I'm calling it here, this trial will fail hard.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.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.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.