Coronavirus Genetics, Prosthetic Hands. March 6, 2020, Part 1

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🗓️ 6 March 2020

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

A New Trick For Dexterity In Prosthetic Hands Researchers working on the next generation of prosthetic limbs have a few fundamental engineering problems to overcome. For starters, how can people using prosthetic limbs effectively signal what motions they want to perform? A team of researchers may have a solution: A surgical technique that uses muscle tissue to amplify the nerve signals. Participants fitted with prosthetic hands after this surgery, described in Science Translational Medicine this week, reported being able to manipulate objects with a degree of control and dexterity not previously seen. Electrical engineer Cynthia Chestek at the University of Michigan explains why this muscle graft seems to be solving the engineering problem of reading nerve signals and what the next generation of prosthetic hands could be capable of. Looking To The Genome To Track And Treat The New Coronavirus As of Thursday, March 5, Washington state has reported over 30 cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. To better understand the pathogen and the disease, scientists have sequenced the genome of the virus from two of the patients. Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at Scripps Research who uses genomics to track the spread of diseases, discusses how the genetic information from these patients can help determine the spread of the virus globally. Plus, Ralph Baric, a coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, talks about developing vaccine and drug candidates for COVID-19 and how the genomic sequences from this outbreak can be used to help create treatments. Can You Name That Call? Test Your Animal Sound Trivia Can you differentiate the cry of an Antarctic Weddell seal from the song of an emperor penguin? How about the bellows of a howler monkey from a warthog’s rumbling roar? The animal kingdom is filled with diverse calls and sounds, and for World Wildlife Day earlier this week on Tuesday, we curated them—in a quiz. SciFri’s digital producer Daniel Peterschmidt teamed up with Google Earth to create an interactive quiz that hops you around the world and highlights the many (sometimes surprising) sounds that species make. Daniel challenges Ira to an animal sound showdown. Test your knowledge with the Science Friday Google Earth Animal Sound Quiz! What You Don’t Know About Well Water Could Hurt You Residents in Kansas who use private wells face uncertainty about what’s in their water. Environment and energy reporter Brian Grimmett for KMUW in Wichita tells us the State of Science. A Human Trial For CRISPR Gene Therapy This week, researchers announced that they have started a clinical trial of a treatment that uses the CRISPR gene-editing technique on live cells inside a human eye. Plus a satellite rescue mission, parrot probability, and more in this week’s News Roundup.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.
0:02.6	A bit later in the hour, we'll have an update on the coronavirus outbreak and talk about how geneticists are helping to monitor its spread.
0:11.2	But first, this week, doctors started the first human trial of a gene therapy involving the gene editing technique CRISPR, hoping to combat a form of congenital blindness.
0:23.6	It's a tell more about that and other selected short subjects in science as our own, Charles Berkwis.
0:28.6	Welcome back, Charles.
0:29.6	Hey, Ira.
0:30.6	Let's talk about this.
0:31.6	Yeah, so this week, the researchers announced that they've started a clinical trial of a treatment that would use the CRISPR gene editing technique
0:38.2	on live cells inside a human eye.
0:41.1	They're trying to treat one variant of a condition called Lieber congenital amurosis.
0:45.3	It's a retinal disorder that causes severe visual impairment from infancy, basically.
0:51.6	And so they're injecting this treatment under the retina inside a living
0:55.2	person's eye. And why use CRISPR for this? So standard gene therapy, you'd try and sort of
1:01.1	swap out the gene by ferrying a replacement gene inside the cell. The messed up gene in this
1:08.5	case is too big to fit in that viral payload.
1:11.7	So instead what they're trying to do is use the CRISPR technique just to sort of delete the problem section of the gene in the hopes that it will allow the cells to function normally.
1:21.9	So what kind of time frame are we talking about?
1:25.0	So this is a phase one-two trial.
1:27.0	They're testing both safety and
1:28.3	efficacy here. In animal tests, they were able to correct about half of the cells in the eye.
1:34.7	It'll be a few weeks to maybe a month before they find out whether this particular patient has any
1:40.1	benefit from the treatment. Let's move on to the continuing bad news about climate change.
	...

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