“The distance between curing a rat and injecting a human being with addiction to alcohol with an epigenetic editor is a formidable one,” says Urnov. But, he continues, rats aren’t humans, and we shouldn’t leap to conclusions.
“I’m struck deeply by this work showcasing the feasibility of changing a gene’s memory of its experience,” says Fyodor Urnov, a professor of genetics at the UC Berkeley and scientific director at the Innovative Genomics Institute of UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco. The study raises the possibility that our molecular memory could be revised-or even erased. Following the injection, the rats had more anxiety and consumed more alcohol than they did before. They tested it in rats that weren’t exposed to alcohol in adolescence. To test that the Arc gene was truly responsible for this outcome, the researchers also designed a Crispr injection meant to decrease its expression.
“I think a lot more work needs to be done in terms of how this can be translated into humans for a therapy, but I have high hopes.” “We didn’t see any indication of their drinking coming back to baseline, so we think that maybe this epigenetic editing will produce a long-lasting effect,” Pandey says.