CRISPR's Next Advance Is Bigger Than You Think | Jennifer Doudna | TED

The essence of being human is that we solve problems. And when we're faced with enormous problems like disease and climate change, we need to solve them by collaboration. I'm excited to tell you about a new kind of collaboration that will absolutely create solutions to these big problems.

It's a collaboration that's unexpected because it's between humans and the tiniest organisms that populate our planet: the bacteria and other microbes that live in, on and around us. Bacteria may be small and unseen, but they often have inspired transformative innovations, including the one that has become the cornerstone of my own research. Over the past decade, I've been at the forefront of developing a revolutionary technology called CRISPR that has come from the study of how bacteria fight viral infection.

CRISPR is amazing because it allows us to precisely edit the DNA in living organisms, including in people and plants. With CRISPR, we can change, remove or replace the genes that govern the function of cells. This means that we now have the ability to use CRISPR like a word processor to find, cut and paste text.

CRISPR, amazingly, has already cured people of devastating disorders like sickle cell disease, and it's created rice plants that are resistant to both diseases and drought. Incredible, right? But the next world-changing advance with CRISPR will actually come from using it in a way that will allow us to go to the next level by editing genes beyond just in individual organisms.

We now have the ability to use CRISPR to edit entire populations of tiny microbes, called microbiomes, that live in and on our bodies. For decades, scientists studied bacteria one organism at a time, as if each type of bacteria behaved independently. But we now know that bacterial behaviors, both good and bad, result from their interactions within complex microbiomes.

In humans, dysfunctional gut microbiomes are associated with diseases as diverse as Alzheimer's and asthma. And in farm animals, microbiomes produce methane, a powerful contributor to climate change. But when they're healthy, both human and animal microbiomes can actually prevent disease and reduce methane emissions.

So to harness these benefits, we need a way to precisely and reproducibly control these microbial communities. So why have microbiomes been difficult to control in the past? It turns out that microbiomes are very complex, and they're difficult to manipulate.

Antibiotics affect the entire microbiome and their overuse can lead to drug resistance. Diet and probiotics are nonspecific and they're often ineffective. Fecal transplants face various challenges to both effectiveness and acceptance.

(Laughter) But with CRISPR, we have a tool that works like a scalpel. It allows us to target a particular gene in a particular kind of cell. With CRISPR, we can change one kind of bacterium without affecting all the others.

Another challenge is that less than one percent of the world’s microbial species have been grown and studied in the lab. Fortunately, we can now access the other 99 percent due to the pioneering research of my colleague, Jill Banfield, and her breakthrough technology, metagenomics, which is a tool that allows us to figure out what species are present and what they're doing in a microbial community. Metagenomics creates a detailed blueprint of a complex microbiome, and that means that we can use it to figure out how to use gene editing tools in the right gene, in the right organism.

You might be wondering how we can take this new knowledge and harness it to solve real world problems. Well, we're bringing together these two breakthrough technologies, metagenomics and CRISPR, to create a brand new field of science called precision microbiome editing. This will allow us to discover links between dysfunctional microbiomes and disease or greenhouse gas emissions.

We can develop modified and improved microbiome editors and show that they're safe and effective. And we can then begin to deploy these optimized solutions to create the kinds of solutions that will be transformative in the future. So how does this affect our health and the health of our planet?

We know the poorest countries and people are the most affected by climate change, and it's a problem created by the wealthiest people. And methane is a big part of the problem. It's been a major contributor to rising global temperatures since preindustrial times.

Specific microbiome compositions in livestock can actually reduce methane emissions by up to 80 percent. But doing that today currently requires daily interventions at enormous expense, and it just doesn't scale. But with precision microbiome editing, we have an opportunity to modify a calf's microbiome at birth, limiting that animal's impact on the climate for its entire lifetime.

And this is beneficial for farmers because reduced methane production means more efficient conversion of feed into food. Importantly, these tools can be used in the future to reduce methane emissions from other sources, like landfills, wastewater and rice paddies. Ultimately, microbiomes generate up to two-thirds of all of the methane emissions globally.

So our technology could really move the needle in our fight against climate change. In human health, asthma affects up to 300 million people around the world, a number that grows by 50 percent each decade, and it disproportionately affects lower-income children. Our team has identified a promising link between a molecule produced in the gut microbiome and asthma development.

With precision microbiome editing, we could offer a child at risk for asthma a noninvasive therapy that would eliminate asthma-inducing molecules, changing her life trajectory. And what's really exciting is that these same approaches in the future could help us treat or even prevent human diseases that are linked to the gut microbiome, including obesity, diabetes and Alzheimer's. I think it’s fascinating that we can now use CRISPR to edit the same tiny organisms that gave us CRISPR.

In doing so, we’re collaborating with the ultimate partner: nature. Together, we can use CRISPR-powered precision microbiome editing to build a more resilient future for all of us. Thank you very much.