By Christiana Ohimai
Team Lead Genome Editing Research Group, Department of Cell Biology and Genetics, University of Lagos(UNILAG), Prof. Joseph Minari, has underscored the relevance of genome editing as a solution to genetic disorders, life-threatening diseases, such as cancer, sickle cell, Down syndrome,among others.
Genome editing, also referred to as gene editing, is a group of technologies that enables scientists to change an organism’s deoxyribonucleic acid(DNA), creating room for genetic material to be added, removed, or altered at particular locations in the genome.
Minari spoke at the opening of the 2nd edition of the CRISPR Hands-on workshop with the theme: “From Lab to Life: CRISPR promise for healthcare and hunger solution”. The workshop was held on the UNILAG campus in Akoka, Lagos.
CRIPR is Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats.
On the importance of the workshop, he noted that it is meant for students and researchers, adding that it is intended to bring solutions to some genetic disorders that people think have no remedy.
Minari said: “So genome editing promises us the potential to actually bring solutions to them. For example, we have quite a number of genetic disorders or diseases, as the case may be, I’m very sure you heard the testimony of the sickle cell patient that actually took that particular shot and is fine.
“And we are training not only our students, people from other institutions too. We even have lecturers among the participants from research institutes and different laboratories.
‘‘So, we are trying to train them along this line and then see how we can start up our research along this line using the CRISPR technology to correct several kinds of life-threatening diseases, such as cancer, sickle cell, Down syndrome, and even for different kinds of organ transplants.”
The Vice Chancellor, Prof. Folasade Ogunsola,who was represented by the Dean of Faculty of Science, Prof. Olayinka Asekun, expressed delight that the university is at the forefront of bringing together young scientists, educators, practitioners, and policy thinkers to explore the real-world applications of technologies like CRISPR and other genome-editing platforms.
The VC, who declared the event open, expressed optimism that the workshop would contribute to a healthier and more food-secure world.
She thanked the organisers, partners, facilitators and supporters who made the event possible.
Assistant professor, Department of Biology, University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and Co-Director TReND in Africa and Co-founder Gene4All Thomas Auer said: “ For one, DNA’s subunit is used to proteins and find their specific target sequence. This was developed in 2005, the disadvantage for each target sequence was to modify or engineer these protein subunits.
“Similarly, negative cases were able to cut a very restricted part of the genome in very refined segments, So the real revolution came when targeted cases were developed in 2011, so this was a much more modern development that allowed people to quickly modify certain and target certain patients in the genome.”
Co-Founder and Executive Director Gene4All, Spain Vincenzo Di Donato in a practical demonstration noted that 70 percent of the human protein genes are related to zebrafish genes, adding that 84 percent of human diseases genes have zebrafish counterpart, meaning that disease can be modelled with the small zebrafish larvae.
“And now we go to the research part, why we use the zebrafish network. And as I said, since this model has been used for a very long time, for basic research, but for a few years, the advantages of the fish for disease modelling have become very clear.
“I mean, this is a fish larva, which is very small, which is transparent, and the important thing is that the conservation, the physiological conservation, developmental conservation is very high between zebrafish and humans.
“With this extra development, and since the larvae are transparent, we can observe in a normal specific manner how the fish develop in normal disease conditions,” he said.