Off-target edits

Off-target edits

Off-target edits refer to unintended changes made to the genome during the process of genome editing, which can have unknown consequences and pose a barrier to the therapeutic application of the technology. Scientists are working to improve the precision of genome editing techniques in order to reduce the risk of off-target edits.From: The Wisdom of Germline Editing: An Ethical Analysis of the Use of CRISPR-Cas9 to Edit Human Embryos [2019], Pharmaceutical Biocatalysis [2020]

Genome Editing and Gene Therapies: Complex and Expensive Drugs

View Chapter

Purchase Book

Published in Peter Grunwald, Pharmaceutical Biocatalysis, 2020

Peter Grunwald

Off-target edits with unknown consequences are a concern and present a barrier to the therapeutic application of genome editing and off-target prediction algorithms need to be improved (Newton et al., 2019). For recent articles concerning methods to identify off-target activities see, e.g., Wienert et al. (2019), Zuo et al. (2019), Jin et al. (2019), Kempton and Ki (2019), or Akcakaya et al. (2018), respectively, that are in part briefly discussed below.

The Wisdom of Germline Editing: An Ethical Analysis of the Use of CRISPR-Cas9 to Edit Human Embryos

View Article

Journal Information

Published in The New Bioethics, 2019

Jennifer M. Gumer

The first ethical question to address regarding the use of CRISPR to edit embryos is whether the technology is, or will ever be, sufficiently safe for clinical use. The most obvious safety hazard currently related to CRISPR is the risk of unintended edits (i.e., off-target edits) (Liang et al.2015, Tang et al.2017). The effect of these off-target edits on health may range from benign to deleterious, depending on the nature of the genes and edits involved.

Explore chapters and articles related to this topic

Genome Editing and Gene Therapies: Complex and Expensive Drugs

The Wisdom of Germline Editing: An Ethical Analysis of the Use of CRISPR-Cas9 to Edit Human Embryos