Speaker: Medical community needs to determine ethics of genomic editing
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Human genomic editing can offer many benefits, but it is important to take ethical considerations into account when deciding what information should influence medical practice, a speaker said during ASN Kidney Week.
“Advances and opportunities come with responsibilities,” Victor J. Dzau, MD, said during his state-of-the-art lecture. “No longer can scientists and clinicians develop new sciences and technologies without considering the social implications of their work.”
Dzau, a cardiologist, is president of the National Academy of Medicine and vice-chair of the National Research Council, as well as the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Medicine and professor of pathology at Duke University. He noted that human genome editing was the center of research for the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The two “amazing, brilliant” scientists took a bacterial immune mechanism, called CRISPR, and turned it into a tool to edit genomes.
“I think that this scientific achievement, in a greater context, is a revolution of biomedical sciences,” Dzau said. “There have been three major revolutions in medical sciences – DNA discovery, molecular biology and the genomic revolution, followed by the technology that is now being applied in some many different ways.”
All these biomedical breakthroughs have “enormous potential to transform health and health care,” he said. “But along with this technology come societal limitations, whether they are ethical or medical ... and it is important to recognize the upside but mitigate the potential downside” in use of these breakthroughs.
Dzau said biomedical breakthroughs mandate that clinicians pose ethical questions about information and how it is used. That ethical review, he said, must also include the public. Those new technologies, including biomedical engineering, regenerative medicine, immunotherapy, synthetic biology, tissue engineering and precision medicine, offer health care practitioners the tools to go beyond traditional medicine.
Part of the responsibly for monitoring information falls in the hands of the Heritable Human Genome Editing, an international commission on the clinical use of human germline genome editing that Dzau created. “The commission calls for a translational pathway for heritable human genome editing,” Dzau said.
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Dzau V. State-of-the-art lecture: Human genome editing: Responsible pathway forward. Presented at: ASN Kidney Week. Oct. 22-25, 2020 (virtual meeting).
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