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Title: UK Scientists Plan to Construct Synthetic Human Genetic Material From
Scratch

Link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/06/30/0...

"Researchers are embarking on an ambitious project to construct human genetic
material from scratch," reports the Guardian, "to learn more about how DNA
works and pave the way for the next generation of medical therapies."
Scientists on the Synthetic Human Genome (SynHG) project will spend the next
five years developing the tools and knowhow to build long sections of human
genetic code in the lab. These will be inserted into living cells to
understand how the code operates. Armed with the insights, scientists hope to
devise radical new therapies for the treatment of diseases. Among the
possibilities are living cells that are resistant to immune attack or
particular viruses, which could be transplanted into patients with autoimmune
diseases or with liver damage from chronic viral infections. "The information
gained from synthesising human genomes may be directly useful in generating
treatments for almost any disease," said Prof Jason Chin, who is leading the
project at the MRC's Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge...
For the SynHG project, researchers will start by making sections of a human
chromosome and testing them in human skin cells. The project involves teams
from the universities of Cambridge, Kent, Manchester, Oxford and Imperial
College London... Embedded in the project is a parallel research effort into
the social and ethical issues that arise from making genomes in the
laboratory, led by Prof Joy Zhang at the University of Kent. "We're a little
way off having anything tangible that can be used as a therapy, but this is
the time to start the discussion on what we want to see and what we don't
want to see," said Dr Julian Sale, a group leader at the LMB.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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