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Wow, exciting work out last week on a new gene editing system called bridge editing, which could expand the range of diseases addressable by genetic medicine. Where CRISPR fixes “typos,” bridge editing may be able to rewrite an entire chapter of DNA—up to nearly 1 million base pairs. That scale matters. For example, diseases like Huntington’s and Friedreich’s ataxia are driven by long, repetitive DNA expansions. Even partially trimming those repeats could lessen severity of disease. Earlier gene-editing tools weren’t designed to correct these large structures. Bridge editing may finally make them tractable at the genetic level—potentially enabling cures by targeting the root cause of disease. The technology is still early, but it could open therapeutic opportunities that previous editing approaches left out of reach.
Shea_ARK ↗