CRISPR is foremost a research tool. Calling it "extremely overhyped" without restricting it medical treatment seems disingenuous.

The CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool was developed in 2012, so I don't find it surprising that merely 14 years later, there's only one approved treatment. From discovery to approval, drug development often takes 10-15 years, and often much longer for novel techniques. So I'd say it too early to call it overhyped for treatments.

Finally, I think we'll see a lot of treatments that don't use CRISPR-Cas9, but related gene editing techniques, but it'll take another 10 to 20 years.

Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRNA_vaccine#History for how long another novel technique has been in development before it became really widespread with the mrna-based covid-19 vaccines.

Why does it take 20 years? Except, of course, that it does not work nowhere near as well as it is being promoted - aka hyped.

mRNA vaccines are also quite different. Do they modify the DNA? Of course not. So that's already very different.

One of the reasons is, you don't get really good data on how something works until you start running clinical trials for it. It's all very time-consuming - having to plan how the trial is going to work, getting approval for it, finding subjects who meet the criteria (here, a specific type of cancer at a specific stage probably) and sites near them willing to work with you, manufacturing and shipping the treatments, and only then can you start gathering data. If it didn't work, you gotta start over, And it all costs a boatload of money too.

Let's see... first of all, 14 years ago was the discovery of the base mechanism, not of specific treatments. So specific treatments need to be developed, delivery systems need to be developed, side effects reduced. Then you need safety tests and efficacy tests.

> mRNA vaccines are also quite different. Do they modify the DNA? Of course not. So that's already very different.

And yet it took more than 30 years after the first mRNA experiments to develop a successful vaccine. Why it should be so much faster for CRISPR & Co?