Emergent challenges for CRISPR: biosafety, biosecurity, patenting, and regulatory issues
Emergent challenges for CRISPR: biosafety, biosecurity, patenting, and regulatory issues
Tags: CRISPR, Gene editing, Policy, Regulation, Risk and safetyBraddick, D. , and Ramarohetra, R. F., Genome Engineering Via Crispr-Cas9 System, 2021.
The recent advancements of CRISPR-Cas technologies have transformed this simple and efficient gene editing technique into an extraordinarily powerful tool. The most anticipated applications could create novel therapeutics against mankind’s most serious afflictions and help eradicate vector-based diseases. However, with these desired benefits come new ethical questions and potential threats. CRISPR technologies are not yet fully developed toward delivering all of their promises, and suffer from biosafety problems in human products and biosecurity threats arising from its potential dual use and errant gene drives. Furthermore, the future innovations of CRISPR technologies may encounter non-scientific challenges in patentability and unclear legal regulations at the national and international levels. This chapter will discuss these issues, and where possible, will highlight the currently proposed solutions that could mitigate the threats, and could address the problems that hold back CRISPR’s full potential.
