“Algae are the future”
This had been the tagline of Dr. Hofmann’s research for years. Over and over again, he had explained to people how important it was to direct money to the research of the diverse family of algae. Food production, energy production, pharmaceuticals, fertilization of crops. Algae had the potential to be used everywhere.
It had been the best day in his career when the institute had finally decided to fund his research on dinoflagellates, tiny single cell algae with an interesting characteristic: Many of them were predatory and thus eating other tiny organisms.
Luciella masanensis had been discovered relatively early at the beginning of the 21st century. Some called them the fish killers, as they thrived best when feeding on the blood cells of living fish. Several fish farms had lost all their animals because L. masanensis had been discovered way too late.
For Dr. Hofmann, the deadly algae had always had the potential for greatness that he just had to unlock. But it hadn’t been possible for a long time. Genetic engineering was just too costly. But then, CRISPR/Cas9 had been added to the tools of biotechnical research.
Basically overnight, there was a way to make precise changes to the genome of living cells. And it was cheaper, faster and more specific than anything that had been there before.
From there on, it had all gone by the textbook. The genome of L. masanensis had been changed so that they preferably targeted cancerous blood cells in the human body. The goal had been to find an alternative to chemotherapy and radiation therapy that was less dangerous for the patient, with less side effects and hopefully no long-term effects.
When the experiments on cell lines had proven successful, Dr. Hofmann’s team had moved on to animal testing and finally, they had gotten permission to start clinical trials on humans. Since then, everything had been going really well.
It was the second month of treatment for the twenty leukemia patients that had volunteered for the experimental treatments and all of them already looked a lot healthier. Dr. Hofmann took it as his responsibility to check on every single one of them at least once a day.
“Mrs. Fisher, how are we today?” He asked the elderly woman in the bed he was standing in front of.
“I’m feeling fine, Dr. Hofmann, thank you. My grandkids will visit later today!”
“And I’m sure they will be happy to see that your health is improving every day. You should soon be ready for the bone marrow transplant.”
“That would be just wonderful!” The woman exclaimed with a smile.
Dr. Hofmann left the room to visit the last few of his patients. On the hallway, he encountered Mrs. Fisher’s family who greeted him when he was walking past.
In the next room, there was a young child, eleven years old. The boy had already been treated with radiation therapy before he joined the trial. His parents feared the possibility that he’d develop cancer in a different way when he was older because of the radiation. Dr. Hofmann empathized with their fear. He would feel the same in their place.
When entering, he greeted the boy’s parents. The father got up from his chair and shook Dr. Hofmann’s hand, while the mother stayed behind. She looked sick.
“Is everything okay, Mrs. Meyer?” He inquired. “You don’t look well. Would you allow me to perform a blood test?”
He had half expected the woman to refuse, but she just looked at him and slowly nodded.
A bit later
It couldn’t be. But he had checked and repeated the test several times himself, there was no room for doubt. Somehow, the dinoflagellates used to treat the child’s leukemia had ended up in the mother’s blood stream. That wouldn’t have been such a problem if they had just done what they were supposed to do, but they didn’t.
The lack of cancerous blood cells had apparently put enough selective pressure onto the algae that they had started to attack healthy blood cells. Wildtype versions of L. masanensis would not have been able to feed on human blood cells, but he had modified them to do exactly that. And he didn’t know how to stop them.
It was a nightmare. Dr. Hofmann instructed his team to perform blood tests on all the patient’s relatives. They came back positive, all in various states of progression. He ordered tests on the hospital staff.
All positive. Even himself.
L. masanensis had spread everywhere and the human immune system couldn’t fight it, because it was devoured every time it encountered the pathogen. The effect was even more drastic than with AIDS.
How many more people were infected? Everyone in the hospital had had contact with the outside world. There was no way of knowing how far it had spread. In this moment, Dr. Hofmann realized, that he made a big mistake.
He might soon be responsible for the death of millions, if not billions of people. And he had no idea how to prevent it.
Sources:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17552978
https://www.cancer.gov/types/leukemia
https://www.cancer.gov/types/leukemia/patient/adult-all-treatment-pdq#section/_34
https://www.neb.com/tools-and-resources/feature-articles/crispr-cas9-and-targeted-genome-editing-a-new-era-in-molecular-biology
Picture taken from pixabay.com
