> Once a cell becomes cancerous, the rapid division facilitates further mutation, providing more targets.

That's a fair point, but this also means that tumors have significant heterogeneity, so it can be difficult to find sufficient indels to target. I like your enthusiasm, but this research is still a long ways off from being a 'silver bullet'. Even the paper's authors discuss using it in combination with other treatments.

I'm not saying it won't work; I'm just saying it'll take a lot more funding and research to find out and it's not as simple as you might think.

I found this PNAS paper on CINDELA which is a pretty cool proof of concept but it's still far from being an effective treatment (just like the results of the research from the OP). Their mouse experiments were compelling but a lack of comparison between tumor cells vs healthy cells from the same mouse or patient, plus the short time-frame where they administer their sgRNAs means that we can't know for sure what any off-target effects there might be. Also, since it can take as few as 6 driver mutations to generate a cancerous cell, it may not be possible to find 20+ unique indels specific to the cancer but not found in healthy cells.

It could be a promising treatment in combination with other therapies, but there's still a lot more work to be done before its ready for human trials.

I agree that chemo and radiation are not great options for fighting cancer. The fact that they have off-target effects is a problem, and that's my point; that it's difficult to only target the cancer.

How do you get CRISPR delivered to tumorigenic cells without targeting normal healthy tissue? Targeting anything to specifically hit cancer is tough because cancer presents so similarly to healthy tissue. If you have any papers that discuss this cancer-specific CRISPR targeting I would love to read them because I haven't seen anything about it that's unique to the CRISPR system.

Many chemotherapy drugs are designed to inhibit or kill rapidly dividing cells which allow us to hit cancers with some specificity but other cell populations are also hit as a side effect. This is the reason why many people on chemo lose their hair; hair follicle cells are susceptible to the same chemo drugs.

Radiation is targeted by aiming a beam at the tumor. By using multiple beams that converge at the tumor site, we can ensure that surrounding tissue receives a lower more tolerable dose.

We have lots of things that will destroy cancerous cells. The main problem is making sure they specifically target the cancer and not any normal tissue.