The Global State of Genome Editing

Abstract

Genome editing technologies hold great promise in fundamental biomedical research, development of treatments for animal and plant diseases, and engineering biological organisms for food and industrial applications. Therefore, a global understanding of the growth of the field is needed to identify challenges, opportunities and biases that could shape the impact of the technology. To address this, this work applies automated literature mining of scientific publications on genome editing in the past year to infer research trends in 2 key genome editing technologies-CRISPR/Cas systems and TALENs. The study finds that genome editing research is disproportionately distributed between and within countries, with researchers in the US and China accounting for 50% of authors in the field whereas countries across Africa are underrepresented. Furthermore, genome editing research is also disproportionately being explored on diseases such as cancer, Duchene Muscular Dystrophy, sickle cell disease and malaria. Gender biases are also evident in genome editing research with considerably fewer women as principal investigators. The results of this study suggest that automated mining of scientific literature could help identify biases in genome editing research as a means to mitigate future inequalities and tap the full potential of the technology.

Managing New Technology When Effective Control is Lost: Facing Hard Choices With CRISPR

“…About half of these publications are US based, but the remaining thousands of articles appear in publications from China, Germany, the UK, France, Korea, and other countries. Control and funding of this research is widely dispersed across public and private entities (Siwo 2018). Basic laboratory manuals and research tools can develop high levels of proficiency even in high school biology classes.…”