Lynn Julian Crisci, a 40-year-old actress with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, is eager for gene editing treatments; she is pictured here with her service dog, a Maltese named Lil Stinker.
Lynn Julian Crisci, 40, is an actress, a singer-songwriter, and an ambassador for the U.S. Pain Foundation. She is also a Boston Marathon bombing survivor. Crisci has a genetic disorder called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS), which has magnified the impact of the traumatic brain injury she sustained as a result of the attack that occurred almost five years ago. Having EDS means that her brain tissue is weaker and more prone to injury.
"I would love to learn more about gene editing and the possibilities of using it to lessen the symptoms of EDS, or cure it completely."
"EDS is a genetic tissue disorder that forces the body to make defective collagen," Crisci told LeapsMag. Since collagen is the main component of connective tissue (bones, blood vessels, the gastrointestinal tract, skin, cartilage, etc.), and is the most abundant protein in mammals, EDS can affect virtually every part of the body. "This results in widespread joint pain, usually due to hypermobility, sometimes along with digestive issues such as inflammatory bowel disease, and prolapsed organs."
If life was difficult with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome alone, the addition of the brain injury has made Crisci's life feel unbearable at times. Amidst her week's back-to-back doctor's visits, Crisci said that she would "love to learn more about gene editing and the possibilities of using it to lessen the symptoms of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, or cure it completely."
With all of the excitement these days around CRISPR, a precise and efficient way to edit DNA that has taken the world by storm, such treatments seem tantalizingly within reach. But is it fair to present the hope of such cures to those with life-limiting genetic disorders?
"From the experience that we've had from gene therapy — we're 20, almost 30 years past some of the initial gene therapy stuff — and there's still not a huge number of applications for it," said Scott Weissman, founder of Chicago Genetic Consultants, a company that provides genetic counseling services to patients. "Unfortunately, we have to wait and see if this is something that's truly viable, or if it's really just hype."
"I expect five years from now we'll look back and say, 'Wow, we were just scratching the surface.'"
Defining Our Terms
The terms "gene therapy" and "gene editing" are often used interchangeably, but not everyone agrees with this usage.
According to Editas Medicine, a leader in CRISPR technology, gene therapy involves the transfer of a new gene into a patient's cells to augment a defective gene, instead of using drugs or surgery to treat a condition. After a teenager's death in 1999 effectively shut down gene therapy research in the U.S., subsequent studies helped the field make a comeback, and the first such treatment for an inherited disease was approved by the FDA just a few weeks ago, for a rare form of vision loss. Called Luxturna, it is for treatment of patients with RPE65-mediated inherited retinal disease (IRD).
Since those with RPE65-mediated IRD typically become blind in childhood and have no pharmacologic treatment options, the FDA's approval of Luxturna is "a significant moment for patients," said Jeffrey Marrazzo, the chief executive officer of the company behind the product, Spark Therapeutics. Two other gene therapy treatments were also approved in the last five months, both for specific cancers.
Gene editing, on the other hand, refers to a group of technologies that enables scientists to precisely and directly change an organism's genes by adding, removing, or altering particular segments of DNA. Gene editing tools include Zinc Finger Nucleases (ZFNs), Transcription Activator-Like Effector Nucleases (TALENs), and CRISPR/Cas9. The first treatment using ZFNs happened in November in California, when a 44-year-old man with a metabolic ailment called Hunter syndrome was injected with gene editing tools. Results are not yet known.
Dr. David Valle, director of the Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins, said that gene therapy's "significant therapeutic misadventures" have actually been beneficial. They've helped us learn to "be rigorous in our thinking about what we can do and what we can't do with CRISPR" and other gene editing tools.
"It appears like we are really beginning to have, for the first time, some meaningful and good results from gene therapy — it's moving into the clinic now in a meaningful way," Valle said. "I expect five years from now we'll look back and say, 'Wow, we were just at this point in 2017 — we were just scratching the surface.'"
Over 2300 gene therapy clinical trials are planned, ongoing, or have been completed so far. As for gene editing, no treatments are commercially available anywhere in the world. The expectation, however, is that many treatments that are "currently in or soon to enter clinical trials will come up for approval in coming years," according to a November 2016 report by the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy.
CRISPR Therapeutics of Cambridge, Massachusetts will begin a European gene editing trial this year, with the hopes of creating a treatment for beta thalassemia, an inherited blood disorder. The company will also request approval from the FDA to begin a clinical trial using CRISPR for sickle-cell disease. And Stanford University School of Medicine researchers are planning a similar CRISPR clinical trial for sickle-cell disease. They hope to begin their trial in 2019.
Jim Burns, the president and chief executive officer of Casebia Therapeutics, told Leapsmag that the company will start animal research this year using CRISPR to treat autoimmune diseases, hemophilia A, and retinal diseases. They expect to begin clinical research in humans in 2019 or 2020. [Disclosure: Casebia Therapeutics is a novel joint venture between CRISPR Therapeutics and Leapsmag's founder, Leaps by Bayer, though Leapsmag is editorially independent of Bayer.]
Efforts are well underway to take genome-targeted treatments from the scientist's bench to the patient's bedside.
The Technology Isn't There Yet
Unlike germline gene editing — when egg and sperm cell DNA is edited in an embryo — somatic cell gene editing in adults is not very controversial, because the edits are not heritable. Since somatic cells contribute to the various tissues of the body but not to eggs or sperm cells, changes made to somatic cells are limited to the treated individual.
The number one reason that gene therapy and gene editing treatments are not yet widely available to the adult population is that the technology is not advanced enough. But it's getting there. Efforts are well underway to take genome-targeted treatments from the scientist's bench to the patient's bedside — especially in the case of monogenic diseases.
Roughly 10,000 genetic illnesses are monogenic, meaning that they result from a disease-causing variant in a single gene. Some monogenic diseases that have gene editing treatments currently in development for use in clinical trials include cystic fibrosis, Huntington's disease, Tay-Sachs disease, and sickle cell anemia.
Marrazzo of Spark Therapeutics told LeapsMag that his company is working on gene therapies for monogenic diseases that affect the eye, like the retinal disease that Luxturna targets, as well as neurodegenerative and liver diseases.
But most illnesses are polygenic, meaning that they result from multiple gene mutations that have a combined influence on disease progression. Polygenic diseases, like high blood pressure and diabetes, would therefore be more challenging to treat with genome-targeted interventions. As a result, most research is currently focused on monogenic diseases.
"We don't really know how to target the gene editing to a specific organ in the body once it's fully developed and matured."
A major hurdle of gene editing is the risk of off-target effects. Editing the genome "can have unpredictable effects on gene expression and unintended effects on neighboring genes," wrote Morgan Maeder and Charles Gersbach in a March 2016 article in Molecular Therapy. One such unintended effect is the development of leukemia when a new gene unintentionally activates a cancer gene.
And since there are roughly 37 trillion cells in the adult human body, getting the gene editing machinery to enough cells or target tissues to create a lasting and significant change is a daunting task.
"We don't really know how to target the gene editing to a specific organ in the body once it's fully developed and matured," said Weissman, the genetic counseling expert. If you take an adult patient with known BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations, for example, how do you then "get the [gene editing] system in the breast so that it accurately cuts out the mutation in every single breast cell that could potentially turn into breast cancer, or in every single ovarian cell that could turn into ovarian cancer? We don't know how to target it like that, and I think that's the biggest reason you're not seeing it more somatically at this point in time."
Approval and Access
Debra Mathews, assistant director for science programs for the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, told LeapsMag that pre-existing regulatory frameworks surrounding gene therapy have been sufficient for addressing ethical and regulatory concerns surrounding gene editing. A bigger concern, she said, centers around access to future genome-targeted treatments.
"We know more about the genetics of Caucasian populations than other populations," Mathews explained, due to how genomic data is gathered. This "could lead to problems not just of financial but of biological access to new therapies." In other words, she said, "if you're of European ancestry, there may be a greater chance that there's a relevant genetically-targeted therapy for you than if you're of non-European ancestry."
Ensuring that genome-targeted treatments are accessible to all will require increased cooperation and data-sharing among key stakeholders around the world, as well as increased public engagement that is inclusive of a wide range of voices.
"It's important to be realistic in our predictions to the public."
The Coming Wave of Gene Editing Treatments
Ehlers-Danlos syndrome alone has 13 monogenic subtypes, each with its own genetic basis and set of clinical criteria. Though several of the gene mutations causing EDS subtypes have been identified, the genetic basis for the most common subtype that Lynn Julian Crisci has — hypermobile EDS — remains unknown. What this means, according to Valle, the doctor from Johns Hopkins, is that a gene therapy or gene editing approach "really cannot be contemplated because we don't know what we're trying to fix" yet. This is the case for many genetic illnesses.
Efforts are ongoing in gene discovery by organizations such as the Baylor-Hopkins Center for Mendelian Genomics, of which Valle is the principal investigator. "Our objective," he said, "is to identify the genes and variants responsible" in monogenic disorders.
While Valle is optimistic about the coming wave of commercially available gene therapy and gene editing treatments, he also thinks that "it's important to be realistic in our predictions to the public." As eager as physicians are to offer cures to their patients, "we have to make sure that we're rigorous in our thinking and our ideas are well-buttressed with results."
Estimates vary for how long Crisci and others with genetic illnesses will have to wait for genome-targeted treatment options. Depending on the illness, viable gene editing treatments could hit the market within the next ten years. Though patients have already waited a long while, the revolutionary technology allowing us to fix nature's mistakes could make up for lost time and lost hope.
Residents of Fountain Hills, a small town near Phoenix, Arizona, fought against the night sky pollution to restore their Milky Way skies.
Light pollution is defined as the excessive or wasteful use of artificial light.
Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) -- which became commercially available in 2002 and rapidly gained popularity in offices, schools, and hospitals when their price dropped six years later — inadvertently fueled the surge in light pollution. As traditional light sources like halogen, fluorescent, mercury, and sodium vapor lamps have been phased out or banned, LEDs became the main source of lighting globally in 2019. Switching to LEDs has been lauded as a win-win decision. Not only are they cheap but they also consume a fraction of electricity compared to their traditional counterparts.
But as cheap LED installations became omnipresent, they increased light pollution. “People have been installing LEDs thinking they are making a positive change for the environment. But LEDs are a lot brighter than traditional light sources,” explains Ashley Wilson, director of conservation at the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA). “Despite being energy-efficient, they are increasing our energy consumption. No one expected this kind of backlash from switching to LEDs.”
Light pollution impacts the circadian rhythms of all living beings — the natural internal process that regulates the sleep–wake cycle.
Currently, more than 80 percent of the world lives under light-polluted skies. In the U.S. and Europe, that figure is above 99 percent.
According to the IDA, $3 billion worth of electricity is lost to skyglow every year in the U.S. alone — thanks to unnecessary and poorly designed outdoor lighting installations. Worse, the resulting light pollution has insidious impacts on humans and wildlife — in more ways than one.
Disrupting the brain’s clock
Light pollution impacts the circadian rhythms of all living beings—the natural internal process that regulates the sleep–wake cycle. Humans and other mammals have neurons in their retina called intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs). These cells collect information about the visual world and directly influence the brain’s biological clock in the hypothalamus.
The ipRGCs are particularly sensitive to the blue light that LEDs emit at high levels, resulting in suppression of melatonin, a hormone that helps us sleep. A 2020 JAMA Psychiatry study detailed how teenagers who lived in areas with bright outdoor lighting at night went to bed late and slept less, which made them more prone to mood disorders and anxiety.
“Many people are skeptical when they are told something as ubiquitous as lights could have such profound impacts on public health,” says Gena Glickman, director of the Chronobiology, Light and Sleep Lab at Uniformed Services University. “But when the clock in our brains gets exposed to blue light at nighttime, it could result in a lot of negative consequences like impaired cognitive function and neuro-endocrine disturbances.”
In the last 12 years, several studies indicated that light pollution exposure is associated with obesity and diabetes in humans and animals alike. While researchers are still trying to understand the exact underlying mechanisms, they found that even one night of too much light exposure could negatively affect the metabolic system. Studies have linked light pollution to a higher risk of hormone-sensitive cancers like breast and prostate cancer. A 2017 study found that female nurses exposed to light pollution have a 14 percent higher risk of breast cancer. The World Health Organization (WHO) identified long-term night shiftwork as a probable cause of cancer.
“We ignore our biological need for a natural light and dark cycle. Our patterns of light exposure have consequently become different from what nature intended,” explains Glickman.
Circadian lighting systems, designed to match individuals’ circadian rhythms, might help. The Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute developed LED light systems that mimic natural lighting fluxes, required for better sleep. In the morning the lights shine brightly as does the sun. After sunset, the system dims, once again mimicking nature, which boosts melatonin production. It can even be programmed to increase blue light indoors when clouds block sunlight’s path through windows. Studies have shown that such systems might help reduce sleep fragmentation and cognitive decline. People who spend most of their day indoors can benefit from such circadian mimics.
When Diane Turnshek moved to Pittsburgh, she found it almost impossible to see a clear night sky because the city’s countless lights created a bright dome of light called skyglow.
Diane Turnshek
Leading to better LEDs
Light pollution disrupts the travels of millions of migratory birds that begin their long-distance journeys after sunset but end up entrapped within the sky glow of cities, becoming disoriented. A 2017 study in Nature found that nocturnal pollinators like bees, moths, fireflies and bats visit 62 percent fewer plants in areas with artificial lights compared to dark areas.
“On an evolutionary timescale, LEDs have triggered huge changes in the Earth’s environment within a relative blink of an eye,” says Wilson, the director of IDA. “Plants and animals cannot adapt so fast. They have to fight to survive with their existing traits and abilities.”
But not all types of LEDs are inherently bad -- it all comes down to how much blue light they emit. During the day, the sun emits blue light waves. By sunset, it’s replaced by red and orange light waves that stimulate melatonin production. LED’s artificial blue light, when shining at night, disrupts that. For some unknown reason, there are more bluer color LEDs made and sold.
“Communities install blue color temperature LEDs rather than redder color temperature LEDs because more of the blue ones are made; they are the status quo on the market,” says Michelle Wooten, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Most artificial outdoor light produced is wasted as human eyes do not use them to navigate their surroundings.
While astronomers and the IDA have been educating LED manufacturers about these nuances, policymakers struggle to keep up with the growing industry. But there are things they can do—such as requiring LEDs to include dimmers. “Most LED installations can be dimmed down. We need to make the dimmable drivers a mandatory requirement while selling LED lighting,” says Nancy Clanton, a lighting engineer, designer, and dark sky advocate.
Some lighting companies have been developing more sophisticated LED lights that help support melatonin production. Lighting engineers at Crossroads LLC and Nichia Corporation have been working on creating LEDs that produce more light in the red range. “We live in a wonderful age of technology that has given us these new LED designs which cut out blue wavelengths entirely for dark-sky friendly lighting purposes,” says Wooten.
Dimming the lights to see better
The IDA and advocates like Turnshek propose that communities turn off unnecessary outdoor lights. According to the Department of Energy, 99 percent of artificial outdoor light produced is wasted as human eyes do not use them to navigate their surroundings.
In recent years, major cities like Chicago, Austin, and Philadelphia adopted the “Lights Out” initiative encouraging communities to turn off unnecessary lights during birds’ peak migration seasons for 10 days at a time. “This poses an important question: if people can live without some lights for 10 days, why can’t they keep them turned off all year round,” says Wilson.
Most communities globally believe that keeping bright outdoor lights on all night increases security and prevents crime. But in her studies of street lights’ brightness levels in different parts of the US — from Alaska to California to Washington — Clanton found that people felt safe and could see clearly even at low or dim lighting levels.
Clanton and colleagues installed LEDs in a Seattle suburb that provided only 25 percent of lighting levels compared to what they used previously. The residents reported far better visibility because the new LEDs did not produce glare. “Visual contrast matters a lot more than lighting levels,” Clanton says. Additionally, motion sensor LEDs for outdoor lighting can go a long way in reducing light pollution.
Flipping a switch to preserve starry nights
Clanton has helped draft laws to reduce light pollution in at least 17 U.S. states. However, poor awareness of light pollution led to inadequate enforcement of these laws. Also, getting thousands of counties and municipalities within any state to comply with these regulations is a Herculean task, Turnshek points out.
Fountain Hills, a small town near Phoenix, Arizona, has rid itself of light pollution since 2018, thanks to the community's efforts to preserve dark skies.
Until LEDs became mainstream, Fountain Hills enjoyed starry skies despite its proximity to Phoenix. A mountain surrounding the town blocks most of the skyglow from the city.
“Light pollution became an issue in Fountain Hills over the years because we were not taking new LED technologies into account. Our town’s lighting code was antiquated and out-of-date,” says Vicky Derksen, a resident who is also a part of the Fountain Hills Dark Sky Association founded in 2017. “To preserve dark skies, we had to work with the entire town to update the local lighting code and convince residents to follow responsible outdoor lighting practices.”
Derksen and her team first tackled light pollution in the town center which has a faux fountain in the middle of a lake. “The iconic centerpiece, from which Fountain Hills got its name, had the wrong types of lighting fixtures, which created a lot of glare,” adds Derksen. They then replaced several other municipal lighting fixtures with dark-sky-friendly LEDs.
The results were awe-inspiring. After a long time, residents could see the Milky Way with crystal clear clarity. Star-gazing activities made a strong comeback across the town. But keeping light pollution low requires constant work.
Derksen and other residents regularly measure artificial light levels in
Fountain Hills. Currently, the only major source of light pollution is from extremely bright, illuminated signs which local businesses had installed in different parts of the town. While Derksen says it is an uphill battle to educate local businesses about light pollution, Fountain Hills residents are determined to protect their dark skies.
“When a river gets polluted, it can take several years before clean-up efforts see any tangible results,” says Derksen. “But the effects are immediate when you work toward reducing light pollution. All it requires is flipping a switch.”