Simple explanation
Fyodor Urnov named the field: the phrase 'genome editing' is his. He worked on the earlier zinc finger technology and now argues, forcefully, that a technology producing two-million-dollar treatments for diseases concentrated in the world's poorest regions has a problem it cannot solve with better science alone.
Go deeper
Fyodor Urnov is Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley and Director of Technology and Translation at the Innovative Genomics Institute. Formerly at Sangamo, he co-authored foundational zinc finger nuclease work and introduced the term 'genome editing'. He now works on scalable, affordable editing therapies for rare disease, including efforts to standardise development so that individual patients can be treated without a full commercial programme behind each one.
Sources
- Nature (Urnov et al.) · 2005
Highly efficient endogenous human gene correction using designed zinc-finger nucleases ↗