I received an inquiry about gene drive technology by email and thought that it might be useful to post part of it along with my reply here.
Here is the question:
"Since a few months, gene drive is a very prominent topic. But what I am missing a recent review about the state of the art in building gene drive constructs and testing them. I would like to ask you if you could provide some advice about literature, which would cover an overview about this theme. At the level where I try to follow the discussions, I have the feeling that things are randomly mixed (like e.g. gene drive = synthetic biology). It would be really great to have an overview about what is possible by now, what has been done, which systems work and which do not work. And perhaps where is gene drive applied."
And my response:
This is rapidly developing. A lot of the recent focus is on CRISPR-Cas9 based gene drive and there is some confusion in the media that this is the only form of gene drive. I've tried to categorize the different forms in Appendix A of this article:
One major problem with CRISPR-Cas9 based gene drive is the rapid accumulation of mutation and naturally occurring resistance in the wild. See:
http://www.genetics.org/conten
http://www.genetics.org/conten
http://journals.plos.org/plosg
https://www.biorxiv.org/conten
Work is also progressing on underdominance-type approaches that may get around some of the problems with the CRISPR system.
The Genetic Engineering and Society Center at NCSU has a lot of resources and knowledgeable people in this area.
Here is a series of recent publications that were recently posted---I haven't had a chance to go through all of them yet.
https://research.ncsu.edu/ges/
There are also some relevant publications that will come out over the next few months. I can update you as these are published and become publicly available.
To my knowledge there is no direct application as of this moment, but this is likely only a matter of time.
The US military is also very interested in gene drive issues. DARPA is funding some of the research on gene drive and IARPA is working on ways to detect if genetic modifications have occurred.
https://www.darpa.mil/program/
https://www.iarpa.gov/index.ph
Let me know if I can help with additional information or if you want more detail about something.