HE MADE his name as a pioneer of gene sequencing in the 90s. Since then, however, George Church has also gained a reputation as something of a maverick, with his often-controversial ideas on how to apply gene editing, most notably his project to bring back the woolly mammoth.
Church is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and a prolific entrepreneur. He has also worked for decades to get more people to have their genome sequenced, and with his latest company, he hopes he has hit on a way to do just that.
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Why have you set up Nebula Genomics?
It’s not the first time I’ve tried to figure out a way to get affordable genomes to the people of Earth. I’ve tried many models. I think this one is the best as it addresses several issues. One of those is trust, because we’re using secure encryption. The other is price. I used to think there would be some magic price that would trigger everybody to get their genome sequenced. Now I have concluded that even zero is not low enough. We are going to pay people to have it done.
Why do you think people are so resistant to getting their genome sequenced?
One reason is there’s poor communication of its value by the press, and even by my colleagues. As a result, most people imagine that they are not at risk of having a child with a genetic disease if no one in their family has ever had one. That’s far from the facts. Most infants that are born severely affected are the first in their family history, as far as the parents know.
It’s like seat belts. For years, people wouldn’t install seat belts, and once they were installed, they wouldn’t buckle them, even though it was clearly good for them and does no harm. The same is true of getting your genome sequenced. It could help prevent a proportion of tragic birth defects, which also cost upwards of $1 million each. You can save the healthcare system trillions of dollars.
So you think everyone should get their genome sequenced?
I don’t think everyone should do any particular thing other than breathe and eat, but probably yes, it’s good public health. Ninety-five per cent of people will find there was no point in sequencing their genome, but they don’t know that in advance. Imagine you are coming to the end of your life and sitting in the hospital and you say to yourself, why did I bother getting seat belts and airbags? That would be a very weird way to think about seat belts, but it’s not a weird way to think about genetics, apparently.
You are also working on gene editing in sperm. Why is this important?
If you have a couple that are both unaffected carriers of a genetic condition, they have a high chance of their children being affected very seriously. As an alternative to standard practice right now – which is abortion and IVF – you could edit the sperm to remove the faulty gene. Procreation would then be indistinguishable from the usual, except up front you engineered some of the cells in the testes.
I have been one of the people making sure that this is in the conversation, because the gene-editing conversation has a tendency to go to embryos rather than to sperm. And I think there’s a huge difference, certainly in how acceptable they are to certain groups. For example, in 2004 : it could avoid the unnaturalness of in vitro fertilisation and abortion.
But any gene editing with results that would be passed on to the next generation faces regulatory obstacles, right?
The US Congress voted for legislation that prevents the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from evaluating the safety and efficacy of germline gene editing. They didn’t explicitly ban sperm editing, but it’s implicitly banned. I don’t think they thought that through. The people who promoted that aspect of the bill were probably anti-abortion, but ironically that bill is delaying the arrival of technology that would reduce the number of abortions on medical grounds.
Do you have another commercial venture brewing?
That’s a complicated one: we have 13 start-ups coming out of my lab alone. One of them, Rejuvenate Bio, is working on ageing reversal – in dogs, initially.
Why work on ageing reversal in dogs first?
One of the reasons is we can make the cost much lower. The FDA approval for veterinary products is a lot faster and cheaper, and I want the world to get used to the idea that gene therapies can be inexpensive. Dogs are a really good product target, but they are also a good segue to humans because they are similar in size, they live in our environment, they eat our food, we are responsive to their emotional state. In many ways, they are like children.
We want to do this in dogs that are at least 11 years old. We have tested ageing reversal in mice that are at least 2 years old, mice almost dead with ageing.
What do you really mean by ageing reversal?
Well, there are acute diseases where the recovery is faster in young animals: for example, heart problems in which there is essentially no recovery when you’re old, but it is very fast when you’re young. So, we are looking at things like how gene therapy can aid recovery from cardiac damage, kidney problems, obesity, diabetes – a lot of things that really only kill old people, only kill dogs that are over 10 years old.
“Sperm editing would result in fewer abortions on medical grounds”
Ageing reversal is a much better target than longevity. It’s very difficult to get the FDA to approve a drug that will make you live 20, 30 years longer. The FDA requires you to prove exactly what you want to put on the label, so if you want to put 30 years of added longevity, you have to do a 30-year study. We’re saying we can achieve ageing reversal in maybe a couple of months, so then our study can be that short.
Do the animals you are treating look the same afterwards?
The mice look the same. Perhaps a little friskier.
This article appeared in print under the headline “The maverick putting ageing in reverse”
