Consolidating my previous comments:
I discussed this project with GeneSmith and I think it is promising, though very challenging to implement in practice. The hardest part will be safely and efficiently delivering the editing agent to a large fraction of the cells in the brain.
Some other points:
CAR T-cell therapy, a treatment for certain types of cancer, requires the removal of white blood cells via IV, genetic modification of those cells outside the body, culturing of the modified cells, chemotherapy to kill off most of the remaining unmodified cells in the body, and reinjection of the genetically engineered ones. The price is $500,000 to $1,000,000.
And it only modifies a single gene.
This makes it sound like CAR-T is gene editing, but it isn’t. Instead of editing a gene, it introduces a new one (a chimeric T-cell receptor). Although some companies are working on gene editing to enhance CAR-Ts.
I also know of a PHD student in George Church’s lab that was able to make several thousand edits in the same cell at the same time by targeting a gene that has several thousand copies spread throughout the genome.
The paper reporting this was here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7229841/
I guess this was inspired by my recent post: https://denovo.substack.com/p/gene-drives-why-the-wait
As I mentioned in that post, there are good reasons to not unilaterally release gene drives, so please exercise some restraint. Also it would cost a lot more than $5000 to do it. (Maybe $50,000 on a shoestring budget.)