December 21, 2023
(Bloomberg) – About a million tourists descend upon Roatán each year. The island, just off the coast of Honduras, boasts a large barrier reef ideal for scuba diving and snorkeling, and it has the beaches, jungles and slow pace of … Read More
December 20, 2023
(STAT News) – he sketch reverberated around the sickle cell community the next morning. To many advocates, patients, and doctors, it seemed to perpetuate falsehoods and stereotypes that had harmed sickle cell patients and held back progress for decades: that … Read More
December 20, 2023
December 18, 2023
December 15, 2023
(Wired) – Our B cells help prevent us from getting sick. Their job is to make antibodies, immune system proteins that fight off viruses and other foreign invaders. And they make a lot of antibodies—thousands of them every second. What … Read More
December 15, 2023
(MIT Technology Review) – The company that just got approval to sell the first gene-editing treatment in history, for sickle-cell disease, is already looking for an ordinary drug that could take its place. Vertex Pharmaceuticals has a 50-person team working … Read More
December 15, 2023
(Associated Press) – But experts say the one-time treatment is out of reach in India and Africa — places where the disease is most common. Vast inequities cut much of the world off from gene therapy in general. While access … Read More
December 15, 2023
(Associated Press) – A former professor at Harvard Medical School and founder of one of the nation’s largest fertility clinics is being accused of secretly impregnating a patient in 1980 after promising the sperm would come from an anonymous donor, … Read More
December 14, 2023
(MIT Technology Review) – Vertex Pharmaceuticals has agreed to buy rights to use a dominant CRISPR patent owned by the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, avoiding a potential lawsuit over its new gene-editing treatment for sickle-cell disease. The agreement … Read More
December 14, 2023
(Wired) – Right now, though, it’s still a rarefied treatment. “It’s expensive,” Jennifer Doudna, the pioneering biochemist who won a Nobel Prize in 2020 for her work on Crispr, told WIRED’s Emily Mullin at the LiveWIRED conference this week in … Read More
December 13, 2023
(STAT News) – Fewer than 15 other people with beta thal have started the Zynteglo process, but gene therapies for the far more common sickle cell disease, from Bluebird and from Vertex and CRISPR Therapeutics, were approved in the U.S. … Read More
December 12, 2023
(Nature) – Engineered immune cells have given 15 people with once-debilitating autoimmune disorders a new lease on life, free from fresh symptoms or treatments. The results raise hopes that the approach — called CAR-T-cell therapy — might one day be … Read More
December 11, 2023
December 11, 2023
(New York Times) – The Food and Drug Administration’s approval on Friday of two groundbreaking gene therapy treatments for sickle cell disease has brought a rare moment of hope and celebration to people with the agonizing blood disorder. But there … Read More
December 11, 2023
December 8, 2023
(Wall Street Journal) – The gene-editing revolution is jumping from the lab to the marketplace. The U.S. has approved the world’s first medicine employing Crispr technology, a Nobel Prize-winning discovery that promised a powerful new tool for modifying genes to … Read More
December 6, 2023
(Nature) – The approval of yet another RNA-based vaccine for COVID-19 might not seem momentous. But the endorsement last week by Japanese authorities of a jab against SARS-CoV-2 constructed using a form of RNA that can make copies of itself … Read More
December 6, 2023
(STAT News) – Trading her chances of having children naturally for a chance at freedom from a debilitating genetic disease was a difficult choice. But at least Tornyenu was presented with the option of preserving the possibility of having biological … Read More
December 6, 2023
(Wired) – More details are emerging about a data breach the genetic testing company 23andMe first reported in October. But as the company shares more information, the situation is becoming even murkier and creating greater uncertainty for users attempting to … Read More
December 5, 2023
(STAT News) – Given the widespread acceptance that the current flu vaccines could use improvement, are mRNA shots the answer? As the scientific world waits for published data on which to formulate conclusions, STAT spoke to influenza and vaccine experts … Read More
December 5, 2023
(The Verge) – DNA data storage might sound like a far-off solution. But a startup called Biomemory is bringing it a little closer to reality with the release of new DNA cards that anyone can purchase — if you have … Read More
December 5, 2023
(The Verge) – 23andMe confirmed that a recent breach leaked data belonging to 6.9 million users. In an emailed statement to The Verge, company spokesperson Andy Kill says the breach affected around 5.5 million users who had DNA Relatives enabled, … Read More
December 5, 2023
December 4, 2023
(New York Times) – Lesbian couples and single parents make up 70 percent of the people who now use sperm donors, according to a 2022 study of an assisted-reproduction clinic. Some of these families fear that disclosure laws will open … Read More
December 4, 2023
(MIT Technology Review) – On a picturesque fall day a few years ago, I opened the mailbox and took out an envelope as thick as a Bible that would change my life. The package was from Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and it … Read More
