As you all may have heard Prime Editing is the new standard amongst the community. The discovery of the Cas protein proposed that ammunition was on the horizon to ameliorate our efforts on the war against disease. Well BREAKING NEWS Prime editing is know to show even higher efficiency and even fewer byproducts than many other editing techniques, and actually has a much lower off-target effect than the Cas 9 nuclease.
Many Scientists are starting to believe that Prime editing will be able to correct up to 90% of known genetic variants that contribute to human diseases. My guess, however, is that this will not be the case. Just a short time ago Crisper was all the rage, even though we knew that the success rate was weak, at best; and the off target instances were too dubious to clinically rely on. Obviously these stepping stones are critcal, my point is the glamorization of these breakthroughs are bordering on foolishness.
My argument here is that far before we move anywhere close to tackling 90% of genetic problems, we will have transitioned to a much different way of editing the human genome. My reasoning for this is that the headlines for every paper of Prime Editing is all about how much better it is than Crisper, however, when you look at the numbers they are still far from approaching anything that could be roled out on the wider population. Attached is the efficacy of Cas vs Prime. The off target effect seem somewhat promising.
Please let me know if you disagree, and why!=)
