Doctor/entrepreneur sees promise in medical uses for gene editing

For Mitchell Gold, cancer is personal. That’s because his mother died from breast cancer when he was 4 and she was just 26. His grandmother also died of the disease at age 31. They both had — along with his sister — a mutation of the tumor suppressor genes known as BRCA that produces a hereditary breast-ovarian cancer syndrome in affected families.

So Gold, a physician, UW-Madison graduate and successful biotech entrepreneur, said he’s looking forward to the day when scientists will be able to “edit” the human genome to snip out mutant BRCA and replace it with a healthy gene.

Remarkably, that breakthrough — dubbed the ‘holy grail’ of medicine — may come within the next quarter century, he said during a luncheon speech at yesterday’s Bioscience Vision Summit conference at the Monona Terrace convention center in Madison

Several hundred scientists and business people attended the gathering, which also featured a talk by Gov. Scott Walker, who praised the biotech industry for creating jobs at a faster rate compared to other industry sectors.

“There’s probably never been a better time to be involved with life sciences, in large part because of breakthroughs in sequencing the human genome,” said Gold, a Chicago native and former president of Seattle-based Denderon Corp. When he headed Denderon, it developed a new class of therapies called active cellular immunotherapy, which were specifically designed to engage a patient’s own immune system against cancer. He grew that company to nearly $8 billion at its peak before leaving to start Alpine BioVentures, a privately held biotech company dedicated to developing the next generation of cancer immunotherapies.

“Gene editing is going to happen,” he said, urging his audience of audience of researchers to pay attention this segment of the biotech industry and become involved with it. “Someone is going to do this. And when that happens, it will change the way our species exists.”

Gold said humans have accomplished a lot in the 130,000 years that we’ve been on the planet – which has existed for roughly 8 billion years. He argued that one of the greatest achievements to date was the sequencing of the human genome, which cost $3.8 billion. That figure has now dropped to less than $4,000 and he predicted it will soon become a commodity at around $200 a pop because of astonishingly better efficiencies.

“Soon, everyone will have access to their own genetic code,” he said.

A lot of companies will provide that service, but he predicted it would be a lab controlled by either Google or Amazon that will eventually own and interpret the data if people are willing to provide their genetic information in exchange for some service or benefit.

With the editing of the genome, Gold said “neo-evolution” will have arrived with humans being able to one day determine how they look going forward and it will no longer be left to nature.

“We will change who we are as a species going forward because we’ll be able to sequence our genomes through technology and be able to influence how fast, tall and smart we are, as well as how long we live,” he said.

“You can deny it, or you can participate in it,” he told his audience. “For me, I believe it will happen because it’s personal. My sister was tested for the BRCA gene and had a bilateral mastectomy, hysterectomy and ovariectomy when she was 31. That is barbaric.”

In the future, he said women like his sister will be able to have that mutant gene removed and their risk of breast cancer will fall to the overall rate of the general population.

“We can’t continue to accept whatever our genome delivers to us,” he said. “We have to be able to edit out mutations. I believe that has to happen.”

Gold said he is passionate about reducing cancer because of his family history. But he said everyone should be concerned because 33 percent of women will come down the disease in their lifetimes and half of all men will be affected by it.

“It’s a major epidemic that is becoming more serious with an aging population, with 8.2 million cancer deaths globally every year,” he said. “Eliminating disease from all those patients will change who we are.

“This is how editing the genome will come into being. It’s how it will be sold to society, with the moral and ethical obligations that come with editing our DNA. You will say ‘of course we have to do it this way’ and I support it.’”

During his speech to the conference, Gov. Walker lauded the state’s biotech industry for its job-creation prowess in recent years, saying it is now responsible for 1,400 Wisconsin companies and 32,000 jobs.

“Bioscience has been a key employment driver and is ahead of the curve since 2007 compared to other sectors. But we think we’ve just scratched the surface,” he said.

Walker praised UW-Madison for its $1 billion in annual research efforts — some 70 percent of which is spent on the biosciences. Other campuses and institutions are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on biotech research, he said, including UW-Milwaukee, the Medical College of Wisconsin and the Marshfield Clinic. Over time, he said discoveries coming out of those labs will be translated into products, new companies and more jobs.

“There’s now tremendous opportunity to build on all this great research,” he said. “With this new investment by the state and others, we can provide the capital right here in Wisconsin and be the missing link that helps startups get going.”

— By Brian E. Clark
For WisBusiness.com