Genetic miracles for genetic diseases with CRISPR

0:00 Speaker 1 What is today’s doctor Peter Milos, And he’s our good friend, he’s our in house genius. He believe he’s a historian, he’s a medical expert. And doctor Milosa give us an update. Sunday morning, we’re drinking our coffee. Give us an update.

0:18 What good things are happening in medicine this week?

0:23 Speaker 2 Well, some amazing things that are actually happening in medicine. Then there’s a genetic treatment that’s using a new technology called Crisper which can edit your genes. Our genotype is our DNA, and imagine if our DNA has a defect in it, and imagine if we can go in and repair that defect like a broken screw or a broken fan belt

0:47 in a car, and you can fix it. And the first authorization in the world to fix a disease, which is sickle cell anemia, which affects one in three hundred and sixty five of black people in the United States, is now a reality and it’s happened in England. And the companies Vertex and chrisperg got together, so we have

1:10 the first gene editing therapy. An addition will be used for beta pallacemia, which is a disease that affects many people from the Mediterranean, including in Italy and Greece, and it causes a devastating anemia. Tickle cell anemia affects over one hundred thousand people actively in the United States, and it’s extremely painful because imagine your red blood cell instead

1:33 of being round, it looks like a little sickle, like the little quarter of the moon, and it can’t travel through the small, tiny blood vessels in the body, and you get like mini strokes everywhere. And these people’s mean age is only they only live to be forty, which is a big deal. And the only treatment available right

1:51 now is them cell infusions and with blood transfusions to keep these people going with both diseases. And now we can actually treat them. The medicine is going to be called cass gen V and it will be available in England and hopefully here in the United States it will be available for people age twelve and up. So it’s

2:15 a very very exciting time to be alive that you can make precise direct changes to your DNA, which is your blueprint of our body. And as we’ve talked about before in the Cats Roundtable, twenty percent of our destiny is our genes. It’s like our new car. But imagine being born with a new car that has a defect

2:36 or a missing piece and being able to now with these medicines go in.

2:40 Speaker 1 I remember those called the netsu.

2:44 Speaker 2 Yeah, but it’s pretty it’s pretty amazing that people will be able to go in for these treatments, and I hope they’ll be readily available for people not only the United States, but as time passes costs go down, it’ll be available for people around the world. Any philanthropic organizations.

3:01 Hopefully we will make it available to people who can’t afford it, and it’s amazing that these people will be able to have a more normal lifespan. The fascinating thing is once you make that gene correction, it’s not something you have to take over and over again. Once you fix the gene, guess what, it’s fixed for the rest

3:19 of your life. So I’m excited for things in the future, like you know, diseases of the eye like ret nitis pigmentosa and other genetic diseases where they’ll be able to go in and splice the broken, defective gene and put the correct one in and make people better. So this is just something newsworthy, and there should be happy bells

3:42 around the world for something like this, But you know, unfortunately sometimes we celebrate other things that aren’t as important. But in the end, the most important thing is our health, our mental and physical health, and we want people to keep listening to WABC to hear about more exciting news and medicine, and these treatments will also in the future

4:05 probably be able to help us to live longer because any of our genetic diseases will hopefully be able to get repair through these targeted therapies.

4:14 Speaker 1 Now, lately, I just saw a report that life expectancy of United States males were down six years in the last two years. I guess, is that big horse of COVID and things like that.

4:34 Speaker 2 Yeah, there seems to be you know, a lot of COVID, a lot of viral related deaths, and also there have been quite a number of suicides human beings. We need to interact with other human beings. People being in isolation.

4:50 They also didn’t get a lot of their basic testing, so people weren’t getting their routine colonoscopies, their mammograms and other blood work to find out if the they had basic diseases like diabetes or out of control cholesterol. So what happens when people don’t go to the doctors and don’t get medical care, and we’ve been in all these lockdowns,

5:10 is you ended up with many, many people dying from not getting the proper treatment. And I know of at least two didn’t get colin askabies during COVID and now they you know, they’re dealing with colon cancer that may have been gotten earlier and resected. So all those factors, and of course the drugs and the fentinel coming in

5:31 through our borders. And the problem is these drugs don’t have how many milligrams it is. They’re made in somebody’s basement, garage or in these underground labs, and people take them and they don’t realize how powerful PANDYLI is. Just like that poor child who just touched a little bit of the powder in a staircase dair daycare center and stop breathing.

5:52 And that’s also affected our longevity. But we need to help improve that because it’s kind of said that we have longevity now and men worse than some of the third world countries.

6:07 Speaker 1 Understood. How many people you think are affecting the United States on this sickle cell.

6:14 Speaker 2 One hundred thousand Americans are and the worldwide it’s a lot more. It’s almost a million people. But it’s extremely painful. It’s like someone taking a blow torch to your fingers, to your limbs. And also those microclots make many people blind because the tiny vessels inside the eye get plugged up.

6:35 So imagine you have these little irregularly shaped, sharp edge, little sickle shaped red blood cells instead of the normal round blood cells that squeeze through and travel through our tiny little blood vessels in our body. But that’s okay.

6:52 Speaker 1 We got a mint left. Anybody any other updates? Yeah.

6:56 Speaker 2 The other update is the amazing approval of the by the FDA for the diabetes drug now being used for weight loss, and that’s going to be exciting and use that people will be able to have help getting weight loss and for and that’s going to decrease mortality, death rate and heart problems and other and other problems in

7:22 the United States because when people lose weight, they get less strokes, less heart attacks, less cancer, less Alzheimer’s. So that’s going to be a big, big bonus for the healthcare and hopefully that’ll help bump up the age of men instead of being seventy three point two. Hopefully we’ll get up to a place like you know, Portugal which

7:41 has an eighty two where men live to be eighty two at eighty four, or in Greece where they live to be eighty one.

7:48 Speaker 1 Or the island, the island of Ithica where they live to be one hundred.

7:53 Speaker 2 He got one of the blue zones where they follow the Mediterranean diet strictly and they have a good with family, friends, they go to church together, they pray together, and all that socialization also helps.

8:06 Speaker 1 Thank you, doctor Mihllos, and we’ll catch up again real soon. Thank you so much.

8:10 Speaker 2 Thank you. I have a great day, and thanks for getting the truth out on the Cats round Table. Okay,