Chronicles from the London editing summit

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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CRISPR patients, 3 reasons for hope

Patrick Doherty, Carlene Knight, and Victoria Gray (credit NPR)

There is one more hopeful story from NPR. It involves a woman with a congenital eye disorder who volunteered to have her retina edited. A few months ago, it was a man suffering from a rare liver disease. The first of all, as you probably know, was a woman struggling with sickle cell disease. Don’t miss their CRISPR stories!

Breaking or fixing? A tale of two approaches for hemoglobinopathies

Painting by Hertz Nazaire

Covid19 is affecting everyone, but it has hit the sickle cell (SCD) community particularly hard. According to STAT News the pandemic has temporarily stopped clinical trials and the introduction of new drugs, besides directly impacting SCD patients who are at high risk for severe complications from Sars-Cov2 infection and may need hospital assistance for SCD pain crises.

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