Gene-editing summit touts sickle cell success, while questions on embryo editing linger

After decades of living with often excruciating pain, Victoria Gray had to get used to a new sensation in recent years: waking up without it. “It may sound crazy, but I had to pinch myself to see was I still able to feel pain,” she says. Gray, a 37-year-old mother of four from Forest, Mississippi, who was born with sickle cell disease, arguably became the star of last week’s International Summit on Human Genome Editing in London when she spoke about her transformation. In 2019, she was the first person to undergo an experimental therapy in which blood stem cells were taken from her, altered with the gene editor CRISPR to compensate for the sickle cell mutation, and returned to her body. She now produces few of the abnormally rigid, sickle-shaped red blood cells that can block blood flow, causing intense pain. “At one point in my life, I stopped planning for the future because I felt I didn’t have one,” Gray told a rapt audience at the summit. “Now, I can dream again without limitation.” Gray’s appearance was designed to underscore the rapid clinical advances in somatic cell gene editing—making noninheritable changes to a person’s DNA—and redirect attention away from the controversial prospect of heritable changes. “The Organising Committee had a clear intent … to shift the focus away from heritable to somatic,” says bioethicist Françoise Baylis, now retired from Dalhousie University, who was part of that com...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research