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JUNE 18, 2021

Gene Therapy May Someday Treat Sickle Cell Disease

By SPC News Staff

Will gene therapy someday be used to help patients with sickle cell disease (SCD)? That is the hope of researchers who are converting a pathogenic hemoglobin gene to a benign variant that enables healthy blood cell production in an animal model of SCD.

A team led by researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital demonstrated a base editing approach that efficiently corrects the mutation underlying SCD in patient blood stem