Systems Project, Round 2

Nathan Torturo

Health IT

11/12/17

Systems Project, Round 2

Deliverables

1.       The Critical Objective for my project is to improve the health of the defined population. My proposal is to get CRISPR used in every day medicine. CRISPR is an amazing technology that has the capability of curing people for all sorts of diseases: such as cancer, HIV, and hereditary diseases. I have 5 questions that I will use to guide my research: 1) How can CRISPR improve the health of the human population? 2) How much would CRISPR cost when used? 3) What can people do to understand more about CRISPR? 4) What is the future of CRISPR in standard medicine? And 5) What will hospitals do to store patient health records regarding CRISPR? There are a few things I want to learn about this project. One is what are people’s basic understanding of CRISPR. Another thing is who is leading the development of CRISPR. And lastly I would like to learn is how will companies, hospitals or people plan on making CRISPR accessible to the general population.

2.       In the search of a deeper understanding about CRISPR, I looked up related news articles and looked at where these articles gained their information from. One of the first things I did was just a basic google search of CRISPR and one of the first things that popped up was a webpage called “Your Guide to Understanding Genetic Conditions” by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. The webpage gives a basic explanation of what CRISPR-Cas9 is. Although this information is already something I researched and knew about, at the bottom of the page it gave four scientific journal articles for further reading. The first two articles talk about the beginning use of CRISPR-Cas9 and other gene editing technologies, their successes with using these technologies and how they can be extremely beneficial in using to fight against diseases. The last two however, were not open for public viewing. Following this, I then scrolled down a few web page results and found New England BioLabs’ article on CRISPR/Cas9. This article goes extensively on how CRISPR operates, how it can work in humans, the targeting efficiency of CRISPR, the application of CRISP and CRISPR’s future. The article gave up 54 references which lead me to researching the ones that focused more on the application of CRISPR and the future for CRISPR. I choose to research more about these since these are areas of my research that need further digging into. A challenge how ever is that the articles listed are not directly linked into the New England BioLab’s article. So, I will have to manually search for them and see if they are open to the public. The last research I did was look into sciencemag.org which proved to be a valuable research area. In website, there are two main topics, one is news related to CRISPR and other gene editing technologies and the other is research articles related with CRISPR and its development. Since the webpage is full of numerous amounts of research articles, I will be going through and finding research articles that best help me answer the questions I have in Deliverable 1. Below I have links to all 3 research websites.

First search: https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/genomicresearch/genomeediting

Second search: https://www.neb.com/tools-and-resources/feature-articles/crispr-cas9-and-targeted-genome-editing-a-new-era-in-molecular-biology

Third search: http://www.sciencemag.org/topic/crispr

3.       The structure of my investigation will take the form of a survey. The survey I will be conducting will be interviewed by people in the health community as well as common people. Common people refer to people who do not have a scientific background. The purpose of interviewing common people is to gain a public insight on what is the basic understanding of CRISPR. This basic understanding will allow me to gage the current state of CRISPR, not the one done in research and only known about in the scientific community. However, I will try to interview people in the scientific community as well. Who I plan on interviewing might be tough since I don’t know about ways to reach people who are involved with CRISPR. If and when I find these people I do have some questions to ask them. A sample of these questions are:

1.       “What do you know about CRISPR?”

2.       “Could CRISPR be used in your line of work? If so, how would this technology benefit your work?”

3.       “Realistically, how do you see CRISPR being implemented in everyday medical work?”

4.       “Since this technology involves storing DNA data, will this be an issue for some hospitals having to keep such data on their patient’s DNA in their data bases?”

5.       “How do you see CRISPR impacting costs? Will it drive down costs for patients since they wont have to need more medical treatment? Or will the opposite happen, since hospitals have to store more information and the procedures might be costly?”

6.       “Lastly, in your own opinion how does the general population gain a better understanding on what CRISPR is and what it can do for the human population?”

4.       Finding experts on the web may be a challenging process. Since there is a lot that goes into CRISPR and the nuances of gene editing, finding a person or people who are experts on what I am trying to research may be like finding needles in a haystack. The best course of action I can take is finding a person or people who are front runners of CRISPR or the people who are strong advocates against its use. Since my research is mainly about what CRISPR can do to improve the health of the defined population, this search will help me answer the questions I have in Deliverable 1.