Current Prospects on Genetic Engineering in the Health Sector

Essay from the year 2018 in the subject Instructor Plans: Health / Medicine / Sports / Social Topics, grade: 1,0, University of Heidelberg, language: English, abstract: With the advance of genetic engineering (GE) new risks and opportunities have come under scientific focus, heralding in the prospect of treating many illnesses such as cancer and germ-line diseases both efficiently and effectively. Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) assisted approaches embody a new and improved method to perform GE in a very accurate and inexpensive manner when compared to other established methods. Proposed treatments include targeting specific mutated cell lines using Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-Lymphocytes (Car-T) as well as direct editing of the genome to eliminate harmfully mutated gene sequences. Furthermore, the application of CRISPR in the creation of self-propagating genes via Gene Drive (GD) may become an effective and possibly even necessary method to control the dissemination and prevalence of insect-borne diseases.

This essay aims to review foundational arguments in order to facilitate an educated judgement of the current trends in GE. As the field of GE encompasses many different approaches to handle multi-faceted problems and reach diverging goals, it is necessary to define the frameworks of my review. As such, I will put my main focus on presenting the circumstances surrounding applications associated with upholding or improving health standards across national borders. To do so, I will put forth the advantages and possible applications of prominent GE approaches while highlighting a few potential, associated risks that have already been demonstrated empirically.