In full ambition

The Russian government has planned to create 30 types of GM organisms by 2027

Ivan Shunin, "The Attic"

We are talking about plants and animals, but not about people. Although the creation of genetic editing methods to increase the resistance of immune cells to HIV is mentioned as a short-term task.

On April 22, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev approved the Federal Scientific and Technical Program for the Development of Genetic Technologies until 2027. It provides for "accelerated development of technologies, including genetic editing technologies" for medicine, agriculture and industry. Among the expected results is the creation of at least 20 gene—therapeutic drugs and 30 lines of genetically modified plants and animals. Also, among the results of the short-term perspective in the field of medicine, "the creation of genetic editing methods to increase the resistance of immune system cells to HIV infection and viral hepatitis" is mentioned, which can be considered as a movement in line with the experiments of Chinese biologist Jiankui He.

Medvedev announced the signing of the document at a weekly meeting with deputy prime ministers. The full text of the program is published on the government's website.

Technologies for manipulating the genome of living organisms received a huge boost to development at the beginning of this decade, along with how molecular biologists mastered the CRISPR-Cas system. Almost any experimental work in this field now uses it, medical solutions using it are already undergoing clinical trials, and recently the first genetically modified children were born in China, although the scientific community reacted to this event purely negatively, and the Chinese authorities seem ready to put on trial the scientist who contributed to the birth of children, mutations in the genome of which have arisen as a result of human intervention.

Nevertheless, the market around gene technologies is growing extremely rapidly, and the pace of research does not even think to fade. They are also working with CRISPR-Cas systems in Russia, but domestic biotech is far from the scale of Chinese and American developments. The program itself, signed today by Medvedev, notes that while 9106 patents in the field of genetics were issued in the USA in 2017 alone, 2771 in China, 1847 in Korea, and 1097 in Germany, only 22 such patents were issued in Russia. that Russian state institutions are not acquiring the most modern research equipment, while clearly needing qualified specialists. "For example, according to the federal statistical observation, as of 2016, the number of people working as geneticists in outpatient and inpatient settings was 360 people, and the number of laboratory geneticists was 227 people, and there is a steady negative trend in the number of specialists able to ensure the implementation of the developed technologies in practical healthcare," the report says. the text of the document signed by Medvedev.

To change this situation, the Russian state has developed a plan adopted today and entrusted its execution to the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation, appointing the Kurchatov Institute as the main scientific organization. Now, until 2027, our country will be engaged in the development of four areas at once — biosafety, as well as gene technologies for agriculture, medicine and industrial microbiology.

In practice, this should be reduced, among other things, to such events as:

• the emergence of Russian databases of genetic data (which, accordingly, can become the basis for the development of Russian "consumer genetics" services and the corresponding expansion of surveillance capabilities for Russian citizens);
• search for "new tools for genome editing" (the document does not specify whether this means the development of alternatives to CRISPR-Cas systems or the development of its modifications similar to database editors);
• "optimization of new approaches to the delivery of components of the genome editing system" (the word "systems" refers, apparently, to CRISPR-Cas, and in general we mean RNA guides and, for example, viral vectors);
• creation of new species of GM plants and animals in Russia (30 in total, at least four plant cultures in the short term, the number of animals is not specified, it only means that they must be resistant to viral diseases);
• creation of a complex of genomic-embryonic technologies (i.e. such manipulations, the result of which is inherited in future generations of edited organisms) for "obtaining highly productive farm animals";
• in the medical block there is an item "countering infections, including retroviruses" (apparently, this refers to manipulations similar to the recent experiments of the Church group on making thousands of changes to the genome of a single human cell);
• "modification of immune system cells" is also mentioned (i.e. technologies such as CAR-T or drugs based on RNA interference);
• it is planned to create animals and cell cultures with an altered genome for modeling human diseases (i.e. work on "humanization", for example, macaques, adding human genes to their genome);
• it also talks about "the creation of genetic editing methods to increase the resistance of immune system cells to HIV infection and viral hepatitis" (i.e., work in line with He experiments, which just made GM children potentially immune to HIV).

A year ago, the government already addressed the topic of biotechnology when it published the roadmap "Development of biotechnology and genetic Engineering" for 2018-2020, which stated that by November 2018, the Ministry of Health would prepare proposals "to improve the procedure for conducting preclinical and clinical studies, registration of medicines, medical devices, biomedical cell products involving genome modification a human being, including a human embryo." The proposals of the Ministry of Health have remained unknown, but, apparently, the "program until 2020" is now being replaced by the "program until 2027".

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