>>12768826There are two things to unpack here.
One: cancer.
Cancer is caused by mutations in oncogens. These are usually genes taht regulate cell division, apoptosis, and in general, the survival and proliferation of the cell. These mutation are caused by multiple things. One is theh standard mutation rate based on copying error of DNA polimerase. That muation rate is a constant, somewhere between 10^-9 and 10^-11 mutation/base/replication. However, if this was the only reason for mutations, rates of cancer would grow linearly with age, but this is not the case. The probability of cancer grows exponentially with age, because aging itsself is esentually just accumulative mutations. As you age more and more mobile genetic elements become active, causing exponentially more and more mutations, and therefore more and more cancer.
Tow: CRISPER Cas9
First things first, CRISPER isnt easy to use, nor is it perfect. We mostly use it for germilne editing, because then we can select for success and discard the cells in which it didn't work. If you want to just cause some deletions or insertions, taht is to say, you want to stop a specific gene fro working, its quite effective. When it comes to homologus recombination, success rates are even optimisticly under 5%.
So can we cure cancer with this? Not really. Already formed cancers need to be targeted specifcally, and mendig a gene is much harder (would require homologus recombination), then brakeing one.
Preventing cancers from forming, or atleast reduiceing there probability form an exponent to a linear, could be done with CRISPR if we could ID all mobile genetic elements, and prevent them from becoming active. That is my area of research, it is going well, but there is a shitton of work to be done before we get there...
Ps.: sorry for my shit english...
