Tag Archives: Angelo Lombardo

Chronicles from the London editing summit

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CRISPR patient Victoria Gray talking at the summit (credit The Royal Society)

The third – and perhaps final – act of the Human Genome Editing Initiative ended last week. The first summit (Washington 2015) was held amid enthusiasm for the invention of CRISPR, with the aim of fostering a constructive dialogue between science and society. The second edition (Hong Kong 2018) was dominated by the birth in China of the first edited human beings. The main points in the agenda of geneticists and bioethicists meeting a few days ago (London 2023) was to overcome the shock and focus on the next challenges: broadening the range of treatable diseases, reducing the costs of therapies, simplifying them so they can be administered anywhere in the world, and reach as many sick people as possible.

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Hit&Run – the Italian way to epi-editing

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The San Raffaele-Telethon Institute in Milan has been a leading player in gene therapy for many years. Nowadays, Angelo Lombardo, Luigi Naldini, and colleagues are making news with epigenetic editing. Their 2016 paper in Cell on hit-and-run epigenetic editing is considered seminal work. The company they co-founded, Chroma Medicine, received substantial financing, as recently reported by Nature Biotechnology. Last but not least, the presentation given in May at the annual meeting of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy inspired a Science news entitled “Better than CRISPR? Another way to fix gene problems may be safer and more versatile.” In brief, they injected mice to silence the expression of the PCSK9 gene, lowering “bad” cholesterol levels for months