With Chinese scientist Dr. He Jiankui still receiving backlash for creating HIV-resistant CRISPR babies, and Russian researcher Denis Rebrikov facing condemnation after announcing his plans to create not just more HIV-resistant CRISPR babies but also CRISPR babies who won’t inherit deafness from their parents, French teenager Adrien Locatelli has a paper about a CRISPR-based cure for HIV/AIDS going through review, and after which he hopes its proposals will go through the process of starting a clinical trial.

Locatelli did face his own round of backlash and condemnation – when late last year, he became the first person with DNA-encoded text inside his body – after he translated verses from the Bible and the Koran into nucleotide sequence, which he then injected into his legs.

“Since it is possible to convert digital information into DNA, I wondered whether it would be possible to convert a religious text into DNA, and inject it into a living being,” the 16 year old Grenoble native had stated, following his brief foray into the world of biohacking.

Then, the reason Locatelli gave for his controversial injection was – as he put it, to unite science and religion; a “why not” symbolism that did not have much purpose.

This time Locatelli is going for something less abstract and symbolic by tackling an objective problem: curing patients infected with HIV. To achieve this, he proposes deploying CRISPR-Cas9 through lentiviral vectors to target HIV directly.

The efficacy of Locatelli’s approach hedges on the proven presence of highly conserved sequences in the HIV genome. Targeting these sequences bypasses the genetic variability of HIV; an extremely high variability that has notoriously made it difficult to deactivate HIV’s proviral DNA. Proviral DNA is the form a virus takes when it has been integrated into the host cell’s genome, and as such can be replicated with the host genome.

In his paper, Locatelli also adds an addendum proposing immunization against HIV. Partly echoing the work of Dr. He Jiankui who edited the CCR5 gene in CRISPR twins Lulu and Nana, Locatelli suggests using CRISPR to inhibit the CCR5 gene and the CXCR4 gene; both which act as pathways for HIV to enter the cell.

Locatelli was aware of Dr. He’s work, and says there is a chance it might have inspired him subconsciously, but points out that his approach and ideas are radically different from Dr. He’s; saying that, inducing the delta32 mutation as some assume was Dr. He’s goal – so as to infer HIV-immunity, was imperfect:

“Inducing the delta32 mutation in the CCR5 gene is very imperfect,” explains Locatelli, “First, because inducing a mutation in a gene is a very complex process and it would be much simpler to simply inactivate CCR5 for the same result. Secondly, people with the delta32 mutation are not resistant to all types of HIV but only serotypes targeting the CCR5 receptor, and there are serotypes that target the CXCR4 receptor.”

Nevertheless, as a Generation Z‘er whose generation is the first generation with CRISPR babies, Locatelli sees inheritable gene-editing as something that will eliminate disease and usher in life-extension, and as such he is not morally opposed to what Dr. He and says, “I am not against germline gene-editing if it can save children and extend their life.”

Everything Locatelli needed to come up with his paper, including design vectors, was easily available on the internet – and the only cost he encountered was when he had to use SnapGene software. Despite this, he estimates that his therapy would cost around $340000 per patient. This estimate is based off the ridiculously high prices in the biomedicine market:

“I made this estimate based on prices provided by VectorBuilder and other biotech companies,” says Locatelli, “The packing of the vectors is very expensive, and so is the use of drug-selection markers like puromycin or blasticidin.”

So how does a 16 year old whose only categorical scientific background is a one week internship at Grenoble’s ‘Institute for Advanced Biosciences’ end up experimenting on himself, carrying out several advanced-level experiments at home, and having a scientific paper with a protocol about harnessing a controversial biotechnology to solve one of the world’s biggest challenges in medicine?

“My interest in biology started when I was six after I had stumbled upon one of my cousin’s books titled, ‘Précis de biochimie et biologie moléculaire – Éditions Frison-Roche’,” recalls Locatelli, “I barely knew how to read, but I read the entire book and I understood everything in it. And ever since, science never left me.”

Unfortunately for Locatelli, sharing this sparked interest in its entirety was a luxury as his cousin who is the only scientist in his family, lives in New Zealand and he hardly ever sees her. So Locatelli ended up exploring biology mostly on his own, which led him to doing experiment after experiment, in his bedroom:

“If it’s a safe experiment, I do it in my room,” explains Locatelli, “If it’s a dangerous experiment, I do it surrounded by professionals.”

This demarcation of what is a safe or a dangerous experiment, has been part of Locatelli’s strict bio-safety standards. Something he feels was missed by some after the controversy surrounding his 2018 ‘Bible DNA’ experiment:

“Many people did not understand that the risks were extremely low,” says Locatelli, “And although my other experiments are not known to the general public, they are not so controversial.”

Despite all the controversy that one misunderstood experiment sparked, overall, Locatelli says everything is going great. With the hope to attend France’s renowned École Normale Supérieure, he appreciates how his teachers are proud of him, how professionals have been willing to work with him, and such, with measured modesty – he acknowledges that this is an excellent support network; a support network that extends to his main base of operation at home – where biosafety, also comes first:

“I am only a simple 16 year old whose accountant mother is a Fula from Cameroon, and whose baker father’s family comes from Bergamo Italy. And they both tell me this: You can do anything you want but please, do not blow up the house!”