To me, it really feels like the people working on this are amongst the immensely tiny fraction of people doing something useful. I'm envious and I hope I can one day find a way to help fund those that are better than me.
How far are we away from making tiny robots that can float along in the blood stream and wirelessly beam back DNA and virus patterns they've identified?
Tiny robots already exist - they're called proteins (of which Cas9 is one). We're just now starting to be able to program these proteins de novo.
Reading DNA - well, DNA is inside a nucleus inside a cell. That's tricky to get that information out. But if you're just trying to trigger a signal iff a case exists (i.e. viral infection), well, that too already exists - it's you're immune system.
Problem with wireless beaming is power. The amount of power required to transmit a (radio) signal through centimeters of human tissue is just not a biologically reasonable amount.
If you want to use light, well, that's getting interesting - there are a lot of ways that biology can create and read light (see bioluminescence and plants, respectively). There is currently a lot of research and a number of companies that are building biological sensors that you can 'wear' that can peer into your bloodstream that get access to some information. But the bandwidth is not such that you could transmit much more than a single gradient of signal, much less a few gigabytes of genetic information.
But the research presented here is how to do high-throughput analysis in an academic manner very much outside of a live organism, and in a consumable laboratory setting. This is a useful technique using relatively accessible materials to analytically check that a study's gene therapies are not too far off their targets.
>If you want to use light, well, that's getting interesting - there are a lot of ways that biology can create and read light (see bioluminescence and plants, respectively).
Periodically someone alters an animal such that it glows under UV light. Seems like it ought to be possible to equip people with a "check engine light" if, say, their blood glucose or Troponin T levels are too high.
At this point, having such a 'check engine light', or, for instance, having a cluster of 10 cells under your wrist that change color (which is subsequently sensed by your iWatch) is just a (very challenging and expensive) engineering problem. It's entirely scientifically reasonable to have such biological readouts sensing a number of different biological states. You already blush, perspire, increase heart-rate, etc. - hooking up those same responses to change the pigment in 10 particular cells on your wrist is not much of a stretch of our current tech. It's only logistical sci-fi, not theoretical sci-fi.
this lecture from 2014 goes into more detail: hhttps://youtu.be/aA-H0L3eEo0?t=453 ; talking about using essentially biological logic gates
then they announced human trial on a patient with late stage leukemia(o) ..the announcement with sobering top comment referencing protein built robots mentioned elsewhere in this thread(i)
New psoriasis drugs are coming out all the time, it seems. My wife is on Stelara and it has cleared her up, but honestly just moving to a moderately healthy lifestyle had taken her from bad to almost not noticeable. If one were truly committed to a healthy lifestyle, I think that can get you almost all of the way there, without drugs.
The analogies that the article uses are very accurate. When I read about the side-effects of CRISPR I was surprised that those involved did not take measurements against this issue. Controlling which area will be edited is the key here. Also the smaller the genome area is, the more difficult it is to target it. Imagine that you need to correct the article "an" to "a" in a big text. Maybe targeting neighbouring areas without changing them is needed in order to increase the size of affected sequence. So you need to change "is an ge" to "is a ge" in "CRISPR is a gene editing technique" sentence.
What did you read? Off-target changes are a major topic in gene editing approaches, and are universally reported. It is among the chief advantages for CRISPR. There are hundreds of papers that discuss this, and dozens where it is the focus of the article. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=crispr+specificity
The specificity has been perfectly acceptable for many research purposes for several years now. The current issue is increasing this even more to be suitable for clinical applications. There are many strategies being considered.
