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Ph0ton t1_iw46mel wrote

Reply to comment by BorneFree in How do medical researchers obtain lab animals with diseases like specific forms of cancer which arise spontaneously? Do they raise thousands of apes and hope some eventually develop the disease? by userbrn1

Echoing this. CRISPR is a sea change but not a silver bullet. More developments in the vein of CRISPR-Prime will be great for developing models but besides cytotoxicity, currently there is an issue of cell-cycle arrest with most kinds of edits.

This will cause a survivorship bias among edited cells for those that can avoid that checkpoint and/or avoid cell death for critical, off-target effects.

Lots of work is being done though to minimize off-target edits, prevent cell-cycle arrest, and generally make CRISPR safer for therapy. With the millions of tools in nature, it's only a matter of time for us to find and perfect the right one that can make this viable.

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BorneFree t1_iw47e0v wrote

This is interesting I’m actually not well versed in cell cycle arrest in CRISPR editing.

However, regardless of advancements in CRISPR, I don’t think genetically engineered primates will ever become a mainstay of research - the time and expense of generating these animals is exuberant. I have a friend at NIH who occasionally works with primates and the amount of money invested in their primate center is absolutely absurd.

From the time the first embryo is edited, to the F1 generation alone is what, 4-5 years!? It’s just not feasible imo

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Ph0ton t1_iw4949s wrote

That's a good point. Technical limitations are nothing compared to the logistics.

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zebediah49 t1_iw6ci53 wrote

> With the millions of tools in nature, it's only a matter of time for us to find and perfect the right one that can make this viable.

With the millions of tools in nature, our immune systems have acquired methods of defeating a frustratingly large fraction of them.

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