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

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

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

The approach: harvest her bone marrow stem cells, edit them to reactivate fetal hemoglobin, a backup oxygen system her body hadn't used since infancy, then infuse the corrected cells back after chemotherapy wiped out her existing marrow.

It worked.

"I'm not just existing anymore but thriving," she said. In 2023, the therapy was approved by the FDA under the name CASGEVY, the first CRISPR-based medicine approved in the U.S.

The treatment is powerful but not easy: chemotherapy, high-tech labs, over $2 million. It works, but it's intensive, invasive, and out of reach for most.

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's First Enhanced Animal was a Beagle

In 2015, Chinese scientists used CRISPR to knock out myostatin, the body's brake on muscle growth, in beagle embryos. One puppy, Tiangou, had 8% more muscle mass by four months old. She became the first confirmed genetically enhanced dog, proof CRISPR could be used not just to treat disease, but to deliberately enhance living beings.

The Banana is in Trouble. CRISPR is Rewriting It.

Bananas are being gene-edited to survive climate change. Disease and rising temps are pushing banana crops to the brink. Scientists are now using CRISPR to engineer resistance, boost vitamin A, and delay ripening. In some regions, bananas aren't a snack; they're food security.

🧠 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

YOUR TURN
Victoria's cure cost $2 million and required chemotherapy. Is a cure still a cure if most people can't survive the process to get 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.”

— Layla S

Hit reply. Sharpest take gets featured next week.
— Mario