China vs. the West: Who Will Lead the Way in Embryo Editing Research?
The U.S. metaphorically boxing with China over biomedical research.
Junjiu Huang and his team performed a miracle. A few miracles, actually. The researchers at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China used the precise new DNA editing tool called CRISPR-CAS9 to edit a human embryo, replacing a single base. In doing so, they edited out beta-thalassemia, a blood disorder that reduces the production of hemoglobin, which can result in pale skin, fatigue, higher risk of blood clots, and other symptoms.
The race is on, and it's one everyone is going to try to win.
Huang's group, which did not respond to an email requesting comment for this story, injected 86 embryos and observed them for 48 hours. After that period -- a time long enough for CRISPR to split the DNA, other molecules to replace the base, and the embryos to grow to eight cells -- they tested 54 of the 71 that survived. Of those, only a few had the replacement base, according to a report of the study published in Protein & Cell. The experiment stopped there as the embryos, which had been acquired from local fertility clinics, were non-viable and not implanted.
But procreation was not the point. Far from it, in fact. The point was to demonstrate that it could be done, that in some far off (or not so far off) future, doctors could use CRISPR to eliminate diseases like Tay-Sachs, Huntington's, and cystic fibrosis that are caused by genetic mutations. Going a step further, perhaps they could eventually even tailor embryos that will develop into adults with specific traits like height and IQ.
Experts agree that we are far from that point, years if not decades away from leveraging CRISPR to cure diseases and decades if not centuries from being able to build designer babies. In that frame, Huang's achievement is just a small step, a blip on the timeline of human achievement. But seen in another light, it's yet another sign that we need to start talking about DNA modification now, establishing protocols, procedures, and plans that guide the subject before we get so far down the road that momentum is impossible to stop.
"The Chinese generally don't have the religious objections to embryo research that have held back research in the West."
It's essential to do so now because the idea of DNA modification -- a realization that humanity can control its evolution -- is compelling and attractive. Imagine a world where doctors and scientists could get rid of disease before it begins or ensure a baby would arrive with an Einstein-level IQ. That's intriguing, and also terrifying. What are the rules? How do we know when to stop? What guides the process? And how can we prevent mistakes or unwanted mutations? To borrow from another famous quotation, with great power comes great responsibility.
These aren't questions for Huang and the Chinese scientific community alone. A team from Oregon recently edited viable human embryos, eliminating a mutation that can lead to heart failure while preventing any unintended consequences. Just as importantly, every embryo they edited produced the intended genetic changes, a vital step since a partial success rate, known as mosaicism, could have devastating consequences to a future child.
In London at the Francis Crick Institute, researcher Kathy Niakan used CRISPR-CAS9 to "turn off" a gene that produces the protein OCT4. Without the protein, the fertilized egg could not produce a blastocyst, which is a key structure in early mammalian development that gives rise to an embryo and placenta. The recent study wasn't designed to go further, but the use of CRISPR was important. "One way to find out what a gene does in the developing embryo is to see what happens when it isn't working," said Dr. Niakan, who was the first scientist in the world to be granted regulatory approval to edit the genes of a human embryo for research. "Now that we have demonstrated an efficient way of doing this, we hope that other scientists will use it to find out the roles of other genes. If we knew the key genes that embryos need to develop successfully, we could improve IVF treatments and understand some causes of pregnancy failure. It may take many years to achieve such an understanding. Our study is just the first step."
The point is, CRISPR is here and it's not going anywhere. Scientists will continue to use it to learn about how humans develop. Yet different rules regarding CRISPR and embryo research in countries around the world will impact who gets there first. "I've heard the U.S.-China gene editing research parallel paths as Sputnik 2.0," said Kevin Doxzen, Science Communications Specialist at the University of California, Berkeley's Innovative Genomics Institute. The race is on, and it's one everyone is going to try to win.
Based on number of researchers and ease of regulations, the Chinese are the favorites to advance the science the furthest, the fastest.
Based on number of researchers and ease of regulations, the Chinese are the favorites to advance the science the furthest, the fastest. "The Chinese generally don't have the religious (predominantly Christian) or moral objections to embryo research that have held back research in the West," said Dr. Julian Savulescu, the Uehiro Professor of Practical Ethics and Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Collective Responsibility for Infectious Disease at the University of Oxford. "This kind of research should be done, with the right sort of ethical oversight. The concern over China leading the way is that institutional oversight mechanisms are probably not as developed as in the West but so far, there is no evidence of breaches in standards of research ethics around the published research."
Or, put another way by bioethicist Dr. Arthur Caplan, founding director of NYU Langone Health's Division of Medical Ethics: "The Chinese, because they don't care and don't have moral reservations about embryo work, are doing what they want." This lack of aversion to working with embryos manifests itself in a couple of ways. The absence of moral qualms is one. Funding is another. Huang's study, and others like it, receive funding from the government. His, for example, was supported by two grants from the National Basic Research Program and three from the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
The U.S., on the other hand, bans any federal funding for research using human embryos. A law passed in 1996 states that federal dollars can't be used for: "research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death greater than that allowed for research on fetuses." This restriction can shift incentives as many private institutions or commercial enterprises may have financial motivations or other goals beyond furthering basic research for the sake of general knowledge.
Embryo gene modification recently performed in the U.K. would merit 15 years in prison in Australia.
The embryo research ban is even more strict elsewhere. The Oviedo Convention, enacted in 1997, effectively prohibits germline engineering in members of the European Union. "In Italy, you can't destroy an embryo for any reason," said Alessandro Bertero, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington's Department of Pathology who used to study in Italy. "It's illegal, and you'll go to jail." Later, Bertero was one of the researchers who worked with Dr. Niakan in London, an investigation that was allowed by the UK's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. (In Australia, Niakan and her colleagues would face 15 years in jail due to the 2002 Prohibition of Human Cloning Act, which prohibits altering the genomes of embryonic cells.)
Despite the moral and legal reservations in the Western world, every person I spoke with for this story believed that better, more advanced studies and learning is happening in the U.S. and Europe. "The best studies in my opinion are from the labs in California and Oregon," Bertero said. "The quality of the work [in the Chinese study] – not being critical, but to be scientifically critical -- was just quick and dirty. It was, 'Let's just show that we have done it and get it out.' That doesn't mean that the quality of the work was good."
"If the Chinese or someone else starts beating our brains out, we're not going to want to stand by idly and not do these things."
How long that remains the case, however, is an open question. A significant number of groups in China are working on germline editing in human embryos. The concern is that the Chinese will emerge as a leader sooner rather than later because they can do research with embryos more easily than their Western counterparts.
For Caplan, the NYU professor, the embryo ban in the U.S. isn't based on science; it's rooted in something else. "It's 96 percent political," he said, laughing. "It has basically ground to a halt because no one wants to see repercussions take place if federal funding is involved. The NIH isn't involved. And they won't be."
What, in his mind, would get Americans to start realizing the benefits that embryo research would provide? "The perception that other countries were moving quickly to get the advantages of CRISPR and other gene modification techniques, finding more industrial and more medical purposes," he said. "If the Chinese or someone else starts beating our brains out, we're not going to want to stand by idly and not do these things."
Doing so would involve difficult conversations about the role of embryos in research. But these are philosophical questions that need to be approached at some point. From a U.S. perspective, doing so sooner while the American scientists still hold the technological and informational edge, is vital. Ignoring the issue doesn't make it go away.
Experts think a few changes should be made. The ban on federal funding should be lifted. Scientists and regulators should push for things like allowing federal funds to be used for the creation of new embryos for research purposes and the use of spare IVF embryos for research when the embryo would not be implanted into a woman. (Privately funded scientists can proceed in states that encourage embryonic stem cell research, like New York, New Jersey, and California, but not in restrictive ones like Louisiana and South Dakota, which prohibit creating or destroying embryos for research.) Policymakers could ban reproductive gene editing for now but look at it again after a certain period. A highly anticipated report issued earlier this year from an international guidance committee left the door open to eventual clinical trials with edited embryos. As of now, however, Congress will not allow the Food and Drug Administration to consider such trials. This is the future and it's the scientific community's responsibility to develop the ethical framework now.
"The US and Europe have the technological history and capacity to lead this research and should do so, ethically. We ought to be revising our laws and ethical guidelines to facilitate this kind of research," Professor Savulescu said. "But the challenge is to think constructively and ethically about this new technology, and to be leaders, not followers."
A company uses AI to fight muscle loss and unhealthy aging
In December 2022, a company called BioAge Labs published findings on a drug that worked to prevent muscular atrophy, or the loss of muscle strength and mass, in older people.
There’s a growing need to slow down the aging process. The world’s population is getting older and, according to one estimate, 80 million Americans will be 65 or older by 2040. As we age, the risk of many chronic diseases goes up, from cancer to heart disease to Alzheimer’s.
BioAge Labs, a company based in California, is using genetic data to help people stay healthy for longer. CEO Kristen Fortney was inspired by the genetics of people who live long lives and resist many age-related diseases. In 2015, she started BioAge to study them and develop drug therapies based on the company’s learnings.
The team works with special biobanks that have been collecting blood samples and health data from individuals for up to 45 years. Using artificial intelligence, BioAge is able to find the distinctive molecular features that distinguish those who have healthy longevity from those who don’t.
In December 2022, BioAge published findings on a drug that worked to prevent muscular atrophy, or the loss of muscle strength and mass, in older people. Much of the research on aging has been in worms and mice, but BioAge is focused on human data, Fortney says. “This boosts our chances of developing drugs that will be safe and effective in human patients.”
How it works
With assistance from AI, BioAge measures more than 100,000 molecules in each blood sample, looking at proteins, RNA and metabolites, or small molecules that are produced through chemical processes. The company uses many techniques to identify these molecules, some of which convert the molecules into charged atoms and then separating them according to their weight and charge. The resulting data is very complex, with many thousands of data points from patients being followed over the decades.
BioAge validates its targets by examining whether a pathway going awry is actually linked to the development of diseases, based on the company’s analysis of biobank health records and blood samples. The team uses AI and machine learning to identify these pathways, and the key proteins in the unhealthy pathways become their main drug targets. “The approach taken by BioAge is an excellent example of how we can harness the power of big data and advances in AI technology to identify new drugs and therapeutic targets,” says Lorna Harries, a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Exeter Medical School.
Martin Borch Jensen is the founder of Gordian Biotechnology, a company focused on using gene therapy to treat aging. He says BioAge’s use of AI allows them to speed up the process of finding promising drug candidates. However, it remains a challenge to separate pathologies from aspects of the natural aging process that aren’t necessarily bad. “Some of the changes are likely protective responses to things going wrong,” Jensen says. “Their data doesn’t…distinguish that so they’ll need to validate and be clever.”
Developing a drug for muscle loss
BioAge decided to focus on muscular atrophy because it affects many elderly people, making it difficult to perform everyday activities and increasing the risk of falls. Using the biobank samples, the team modeled different pathways that looked like they could improve muscle health. They found that people who had faster walking speeds, better grip strength and lived longer had higher levels of a protein called apelin.
Apelin is a peptide, or a small protein, that circulates in the blood. It is involved in the process by which exercise increases and preserves muscle mass. BioAge wondered if they could prevent muscular atrophy by increasing the amount of signaling in the apelin pathway. Instead of the long process of designing a drug, they decided to repurpose an existing drug made by another biotech company. This company, called Amgen, had explored the drug as a way to treat heart failure. It didn’t end up working for that purpose, but BioAge took note that the drug did seem to activate the apelin pathway.
BioAge tested its new, repurposed drug, BGE-105, and, in a phase 1 clinical trial, it protected subjects from getting muscular atrophy compared to a placebo group that didn’t receive the drug. Healthy volunteers over age 65 received infusions of the drug during 10 days spent in bed, as if they were on bed rest while recovering from an illness or injury; the elderly are especially vulnerable to muscle loss in this situation. The 11 people taking BGE-105 showed a 100 percent improvement in thigh circumference compared to 10 people taking the placebo. Ultrasound observations also revealed that the group taking the durg had enhanced muscle quality and a 73 percent increase in muscle thickness. One volunteer taking BGE-105 did have muscle loss compared to the the placebo group.
Heather Whitson, the director of the Duke University Centre for the study of aging and human development, says that, overall, the results are encouraging. “The clinical findings so far support the premise that AI can help us sort through enormous amounts of data and identify the most promising points for beneficial interventions.”
More studies are needed to find out which patients benefit the most and whether there are side effects. “I think further studies will answer more questions,” Whitson says, noting that BGE-105 was designed to enhance only one aspect of physiology associated with exercise, muscle strength. But exercise itself has many other benefits on mood, sleep, bones and glucose metabolism. “We don’t know whether BGE-105 will impact these other outcomes,” she says.
The future
BioAge is planning phase 2 trials for muscular atrophy in patients with obesity and those who have been hospitalized in an intensive care unit. Using the data from biobanks, they’ve also developed another drug, BGE-100, to treat chronic inflammation in the brain, a condition that can worsen with age and contributes to neurodegenerative diseases. The team is currently testing the drug in animals to assess its effects and find the right dose.
BioAge envisions that its drugs will have broader implications for health than treating any one specific disease. “Ultimately, we hope to pioneer a paradigm shift in healthcare, from treatment to prevention, by targeting the root causes of aging itself,” Fortney says. “We foresee a future where healthy longevity is within reach for all.”
How old fishing nets turn into chairs, car mats and Prada bags
A company called Aquafil is turning the fibers from fishing nets and old carpets into new threads for chairs, car mats, bikinis and Prada bags.
Discarded nylon fishing nets in the oceans are among the most harmful forms of plastic pollution. Every year, about 640,000 tons of fishing gear are left in our oceans and other water bodies to turn into death traps for marine life. London-based non-profit World Animal Protection estimates that entanglement in this “ghost gear” kills at least 136,000 seals, sea lions and large whales every year. Experts are challenged to estimate how many birds, turtles, fish and other species meet the same fate because the numbers are so high.
Since 2009, Giulio Bonazzi, the son of a small textile producer in northern Italy, has been working on a solution: an efficient recycling process for nylon. As CEO and chairman of a company called Aquafil, Bonazzi is turning the fibers from fishing nets – and old carpets – into new threads for car mats, Adidas bikinis, environmentally friendly carpets and Prada bags.
For Bonazzi, shifting to recycled nylon was a question of survival for the family business. His parents founded a textile company in 1959 in a garage in Verona, Italy. Fifteen years later, they started Aquafil to produce nylon for making raincoats, an enterprise that led to factories on three continents. But before the turn of the century, cheap products from Asia flooded the market and destroyed Europe’s textile production. When Bonazzi had finished his business studies and prepared to take over the family company, he wondered how he could produce nylon, which is usually produced from petrochemicals, in a way that was both successful and ecologically sustainable.
The question led him on an intellectual journey as he read influential books by activists such as world-renowned marine biologist Sylvia Earle and got to know Michael Braungart, who helped develop the Cradle-to-Cradle ethos of a circular economy. But the challenges of applying these ideologies to his family business were steep. Although fishing nets have become a mainstay of environmental fashion ads—and giants like Dupont and BASF have made breakthroughs in recycling nylon—no one had been able to scale up these efforts.
For ten years, Bonazzi tinkered with ideas for a proprietary recycling process. “It’s incredibly difficult because these products are not made to be recycled,” Bonazzi says. One complication is the variety of materials used in older carpets. “They are made to be beautiful, to last, to be useful. We vastly underestimated the difficulty when we started.”
Soon it became clear to Bonazzi that he needed to change the entire production process. He found a way to disintegrate old fibers with heat and pull new strings from the discarded fishing nets and carpets. In 2022, his company Aquafil produced more than 45,000 tons of Econyl, which is 100% recycled nylon, from discarded waste.
More than half of Aquafil’s recyclate is from used goods. According to the company, the recycling saves 90 percent of the CO2 emissions compared to the production of conventional nylon. That amounts to saving 57,100 tons of CO2 equivalents for every 10,000 tons of Econyl produced.
Bonazzi collects fishing nets from all over the world, including Norway and Chile—which have the world’s largest salmon productions—in addition to the Mediterranean, Turkey, India, Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, Pakistan, and New Zealand. He counts the government leadership of Seychelles as his most recent client; the island has prohibited ships from throwing away their fishing nets, creating the demand for a reliable recycler. With nearly 3,000 employees, Aquafil operates almost 40 collection and production sites in a dozen countries, including four collection sites for old carpets in the U.S., located in California and Arizona.
First, the dirty nets are gathered, washed and dried. Bonazzi explains that nets often have been treated with antifouling agents such as copper oxide. “We recycle the coating separately,” he says via Zoom from his home near Verona. “Copper oxide is a useful substance, why throw it away?”
Still, only a small percentage of Aquafil’s products are made from nets fished out of the ocean, so your new bikini may not have saved a strangled baby dolphin. “Generally, nylon recycling is a good idea,” says Christian Schiller, the CEO of Cirplus, the largest global marketplace for recyclates and plastic waste. “But contrary to what consumers think, people rarely go out to the ocean to collect ghost nets. Most are old, discarded nets collected on land. There’s nothing wrong with this, but I find it a tad misleading to label the final products as made from ‘ocean plastic,’ prompting consumers to think they’re helping to clean the oceans by buying these products.”
Aquafil gets most of its nets from aqua farms. Surprisingly, one of Aquafil’s biggest problems is finding enough waste. “I know, it’s hard to believe because waste is everywhere,” Bonazzi says. “But we need to find it in reliable quantity and quality.” He has invested millions in establishing reliable logistics to source the fishing nets. Then the nets get shredded into granules that can be turned into car mats for the new Hyundai Ioniq 5 or a Gucci swimsuit.
The process works similarly with carpets. In the U.S. alone, 3.5 billion pounds of carpet are discarded in landfills every year, and less than 3 percent are currently recycled. Aquafil has built a recycling plant in Phoenix to help divert 12,500 tons of carpets from the landfill every year. The carpets are shredded and deconstructed into three components: fillers such as calcium carbonate will be reused in the cement industry, synthetic fibers like polypropylene can be used for engineering plastics, and nylon. Only the pelletized nylon gets shipped back to Europe for the production of Econyl. “We ship only what’s necessary,” Bonazzi says. Nearly 50 percent of his nylon in Italy and Slovenia is produced from recyclate, and he hopes to increase the percentage to two-thirds in the next two years.
His clients include Interface, the leading world pioneer for sustainable flooring, and many other carpet producers plus more than 2500 fashion labels, including Gucci, Prada, Patagonia, Louis Vuitton, Adidas and Stella McCartney. “Stella McCartney just introduced a parka that’s made 100 percent from Econyl,” Bonazzi says. “We’re also in a lot of sportswear because Nylon is a good fabric for swimwear and for yoga clothes.” Next, he’s looking into sunglasses and chairs made with Econyl - for instance, the flexible ergonomic noho chair, designed by New Zealand company Formway.
“When I look at a landfill, I see a gold mine," Bonazzi says.
“Bonazzi decided many years ago to invest in the production of recycled nylon though industry giants halted similar plans after losing large investments,” says Anika Herrmann, vice president of the German Greentech-competitor Camm Solutions, which creates bio-based polymers from cane sugar and other ag waste. “We need role models like Bonazzi who create sustainable solutions with courage and a pioneering spirit. Like Aquafil, we count on strategic partnerships to enable fast upscaling along the entire production chain.”
Bonazzi’s recycled nylon is still five to 10 percent more expensive than conventionally produced material. However, brands are increasingly bending to the pressure of eco-conscious consumers who demand sustainable fashion. What helped Bonazzi was the recent rise of oil prices and the pressure on industries to reduce their carbon footprint. Now Bonazzi says, “When I look at a landfill, I see a gold mine.”
Ideally, the manufacturers take the products back when the client is done with it, and because the nylon can theoretically be reused nearly infinitely, the chair or bikini could be made into another chair or bikini. “But honestly,” Bonazzi half-jokes, “if someone returns a McCartney parka to me, I’ll just resell it because it’s so expensive.”
The next step: Bonazzi wants to reshape the entire nylon industry by pivoting from post-consumer nylon to plant-based nylon. In 2017, he began producing “nylon-6,” together with Genomatica in San Diego. The process uses sugar instead of petroleum. “The idea is to make the very same molecule from sugar, not from oil,” he says. The demonstration plant in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has already produced several hundred tons of nylon, and Genomatica is collaborating with Lululemon to produce plant-based yoga wear.
Bonazzi acknowledges that his company needs a few more years before the technology is ready to meet his ultimate goal, producing only recyclable products with no petrochemicals, low emissions and zero waste on an industrial scale. “Recycling is not enough,” he says. “You also need to produce the primary material in a sustainable way, with a low carbon footprint.”