Friday, November 6, 2015

Somatic gene editing therapies hold great promise in treating disease.

...And because of this, it will be important that discussion of the ethics surrounding germline gene editing do not frame all gene editing applications in a dangerous light.    This post was stimulated by the news releases over the last day or so, concerning a young leukemia patient in the UK who apparently has responded extremely well to an infusion of gene-edited, cancer-fighting T-cells.  

e.g.




In a nutshell, the team involved used heterologous T-cells that went through a few steps of editing before infusion into the patient.

Note this has not been peer-reviewed yet, and it's only one patient.  But hopefully it will be the first of many more similar good stories to come about gene editing.