logoalt Hacker News

perlgeektoday at 5:47 PM1 replyview on HN

CRISPR is foremost a research tool. Calling it "extremely overhyped" without restricting it medical treatment seems disingenuous.

The CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool was developed in 2012, so I don't find it surprising that merely 14 years later, there's only one approved treatment. From discovery to approval, drug development often takes 10-15 years, and often much longer for novel techniques. So I'd say it too early to call it overhyped for treatments.

Finally, I think we'll see a lot of treatments that don't use CRISPR-Cas9, but related gene editing techniques, but it'll take another 10 to 20 years.

Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRNA_vaccine#History for how long another novel technique has been in development before it became really widespread with the mrna-based covid-19 vaccines.


Replies

shevy-javatoday at 6:30 PM

Why does it take 20 years? Except, of course, that it does not work nowhere near as well as it is being promoted - aka hyped.

mRNA vaccines are also quite different. Do they modify the DNA? Of course not. So that's already very different.

show 2 replies