GENEBRIEF

Welcome to GeneBrief — your fast, clear guide to gene editing and biotech.

Here’s what we’re decoding in this issue:

🩸The woman who rewrote her blood with CRISPR

🐕A dog genetically edited for super strength

🍌Bananas reprogrammed for a changing climate

⏳And a startup takes the first shot at making aging optional, starting with dogs

🔍DEEP DIVE

She Rewrote Her Blood — and Biotech History

For most of her life, mother of four Victoria Gray lived in pain no one could see. Sickle cell disease twisted her spine, drained her lungs, and sent her to the ER over 100 times. She carried a folder of hospital records to prove she wasn’t faking it.

Standard treatments barely helped. They dulled the pain, but not the source: a single typo in her DNA that misshaped her red blood cells into sharp, sickled blades.

Then came a trial that sounded more like science fiction than medicine:

• Doctors would harvest her bone marrow stem cells
  

• Edit the cells’ DNA in a lab
  

• Chemotherapy to ablate her existing bone marrow
  

• And infuse her body with genetically rewritten cells

In 2019, Victoria volunteered to become the first person in the U.S. to be treated with CRISPR for sickle cell.

Scientists used CRISPR to turn off a genetic switch, one that normally silences fetal hemoglobin after birth. By disabling the BCL11A gene, they reactivated a backup oxygen system her body hadn’t used since infancy.

Doctors harvested her bone marrow stem cells, edited them outside her body, used chemotherapy to wipe out her existing marrow, then reinfused the corrected cells.

And it worked. “I no longer have a fear of death,” she said. “There’s more to life now than just waking up and going to the hospital or doctor appointments and staying in bed. I’m not just existing anymore but thriving.”

What began as an experiment became a precedent. In 2023, the therapy was approved by the FDA under the name CASGEVY, the first CRISPR-based medicine approved in the U.S. 

The therapy is powerful, but not easy: Patients still need chemotherapy, and the procedure requires high-tech labs and is priced at over $2 million. It works, but it’s intensive, invasive, and out of reach for most.

Now the question is: can we do better?

Victoria’s story proved we can rewrite blood. Now the challenge is rewriting the system, so cures like this aren’t rare, but routine.

⚡QUICK CUTS

CRISPR Unleashed: The First Engineered Dog

In 2015, while most of the world was still debating whether CRISPR was safe for cells in a petri dish, Chinese scientists went a step further and rewrote a beagle’s DNA.

At the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine, researchers set out to prove that gene editing could enhance not just livestock, but complex, intelligent animals. Their target: myostatin, the body’s natural brake on muscle growth. Knock it out, and muscle tissue grows unchecked, a mutation already seen in freakishly strong cattle and a handful of rare humans.

Using CRISPR and a novel embryo transplant method, they edited a litter of beagle embryos. And out of that litter, one puppy stood out.

By four months old, she had 8% more muscle mass, visibly thickened thighs, and zero trace of the myostatin protein. They named her Tiangou, after a mythological “Heaven Dog” that devours the moon.

She became a biological precedent: the world’s first confirmed, genetically enhanced dog. And proof that CRISPR could be used not just to treat disease, but to deliberately enhance living beings.

The implications are massive.

Dogs are far closer to us than lab mice. They share our homes, our medicine, even our diets. So if we can deliberately enhance them, it opens doors to new disease models, engineered working animals, military applications, and yes, even designer companions.

The Banana is in Trouble. CRISPR is Rewriting It.

Bananas are the world’s most eaten fruit, and one of the most vulnerable.

Climate change, disease, and fragile monocultures are pushing banana crops to the brink. Entire plantations have been wiped out by bacterial wilt and fungal plagues like Panama Disease. In the Philippines, scientists responded with CRISPR.

By knocking out a single gene, researchers created a banana that doesn’t brown when cut and approved it for sale. A small tweak with big implications. But that was just the beginning.

Now scientists are going further: engineering bananas to resist disease, pack more vitamin A, and even delay their own ripening. One team rewired the plant’s gibberellin pathway, making shorter, sturdier bananas that are easier to harvest and harder to destroy.

This isn’t just about shelf life. It’s about survival.

Bananas are a staple crop for a reason. In many regions, they’re not a snack; they’re the food security backbone. As the climate becomes more hostile, lab-edited bananas may be the only ones left standing.

So next time you slice a spotless banana that never saw a bruise, ask yourself: Still a banana, or just an edible algorithm?

🧠 BRIEF BYTE

93.5% of patients treated with CASGEVY experienced zero pain crises for over a year, a near-total reversal of symptoms.

-U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Dec 2023

They say dogs don’t live long enough. Loyal wants to change that, not with robotics or resurrection, but with something far more radical:

Turning aging into a treatable condition.

They're developing longevity drugs that target the biological roots of aging itself starting with large-breed dogs, which age faster and die younger than smaller breeds.

Their lead compound focuses on metabolic aging pathways, which are the same ones being explored in elite human longevity labs. But here’s the twist: Loyal just earned the world’s first ‘Reasonable Expectation of Effectiveness (RXE) acceptance for an anti-aging drug in any species.

It’s the first time regulators have publicly said: aging might be treatable.

Why dogs? Because we share more than homes and snacks. We share environments, behaviors, and even medications. If a drug can safely extend the healthspan of a man’s best friend, humans might not be far behind.

If Loyal is right, the first creature to take a pill for aging… won’t be a billionaire.

It’ll be a beagle.

YOUR TURN
If gene editing could make you stronger (no gym, no drugs, just a permanent upgrade), would you do it?

Featured Take

Can gene editing ever be ethical if not accessible to all?

“If gene editing remains only for the privileged, it stops being medicine and becomes exclusion. True ethics demands that the power to rewrite life be shared, not sold.”

— Marissa S

Behind every breakthrough is a bigger question: what kind of future are we building, and who gets to live in it? Reply with your thoughts, and I’ll share the most powerful reflections in the next issue.

See you next week, the future doesn’t wait.
— Mario, Founder