5 BIOTECHNOLOGY BREAKTHROUGHS

IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS

1. Blood transfusions through genome sequencing:
_Scientists from Harvard Medical School, Brigham & Women's Hospital and New York
Blood Center have developed and validated a computer program which can determine
differences in blood types of individuals with over 99 percent accuracy.Their purpose is
to modernize therapy by identifying rare blood donors and recipients before blood
transfusions.
_"With current technology, it is not cost-effective to do blood typing for all antigens, but
the algorithm we have developed can be applied to type everyone for all relevant blood
groups at a low cost once sequencing is obtained." - first author William Lane, director of
Clinical Laboratory Informatics.
Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180517194750.htm
2. Functional cure of HIV using CRISPR
_HIV is known as an debilitating and "uncurable" disease with roughly 35 million people
are living with its infection. There's still no existing functional cure or treatments to
control the HIV-1 proliferation. However, by using latent, infected T-cell culture,
Japanese scientists have stopped the replication of HIV-1 viruses. They used CRISPR
gene-editing to achieve this by "disrupting two regulatory HIV-1 genes, tat and rev, that
are essential for viral replication"
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-26190-1
3.Bionanotechnology for vaccine design
_Vaccines are a powerful tool for public health and had a major effect on medicine and
society. But now, since the viruses are getting stronger, our vaccines need to be more
effective. Diverse nanostructured scaffolds have been developed for multivalent antigen
display in vaccines to enhance the inmune response. The advances in bionanotechnology
are excellent tools for us design stronger and more effective "biological weapons" to fight
against diseases.
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0958166917301878
4. Kidney regenerated using stem cells in Australia
_Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) of Australia successfully corrected a 12
years old girl Alexandria's gene mutation by combining gene editing technology with
stem cell kidney regeneration. The stem cells were created from a skin biopsy taken from
the patient. Alexandria suffers from Mainzer-Saldino Syndrome which is a rare genetic
condition causing progressive retinal degeneration and end-stage kidney disease. This
little girl is the first patient to have kidney regenerated from their stem cells in Australia.
Source: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-05-australian-breakthrough-stem-cell-
kidney.html
5. Growing Human Body Parts in Lab
_With the help of stem cell technologies, we are now closer to achieving this "unrealistic"
technique which sounds like something straight out of sci-fi movie.We are now able to
grow:
+Eyes (by scientists from Moorfield Eye Hospital, University College London - using
skin cells from people with rare genetic eye diseases)
+Bones (scientists from University of Glasgow, University of the West of Scotland -
extracting stem cells from bone marrow cells to create a ‘putty’ for use as a graft for
broken bones)
+Muscles (by researchers from Duke University - growing muscle fibers from
pluripotent stem cells or cells taken from a biopsy)
+Brains (scientists from University of California - taking stem cells from children’s
milk teeth and reprogramming them into neurons)
+Liver (scientists from Yokohama City University - transplanting mature clumps of
liver cells into mice).
Sources: https://explorebiotech.com/biotechnology-breakthroughs-of-2018/

All the ideas are from : https://explorebiotech.com/biotechnology-

breakthroughs-of-2018/ and https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-new-
inventions-and-discoveries-in-the-field-of-biotechnology-in-2018 (Varun
Kumar Sahu's answer)