GENEBRIEF

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

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

🧬 The first ever personalized CRISPR saves a baby’s life

🧠 A gaming billionaire builds a brain-computer interface

☕ Lab-grown coffee… without the beans

🦣 And the startup resurrecting the Woolly Mammoth

🔍DEEP DIVE

The Baby Who Got a Custom Gene Edit to Stay Alive

When KJ Muldoon was born, he was already dying.

A rare metabolic disorder, CPS1 deficiency, was flooding his blood with ammonia, a toxin that can shred brain tissue in hours. Traditional treatments weren’t just ineffective; they were irrelevant. KJ was too small for a liver transplant. Meds couldn’t touch the root cause: a single genetic typo in his DNA.

So a team of doctors and scientists made a decision never done before in the history of medicine.
“Let’s rewrite his genes. Just his.”

Using a precision tool called base editing, researchers from Penn and CHOP created a gene therapy tailored to KJ’s exact mutation. Not a general drug. Not a modified off-the-shelf treatment. A custom genetic fix designed for one person.

From sequencing his genome to designing the edit to manufacturing the therapy? Six months. FDA approval? One week. That’s not just fast; that’s warp-speed in biotech.

They infused the treatment directly into his body. The results were clear: His ammonia levels plummeted. His body began tolerating protein. He started hitting milestones: sitting up, smiling, holding eye contact. In a matter of weeks, KJ transformed from a terminal case study into a living proof of concept.

“The promise of gene therapy we’ve heard about for decades is finally here,” said Dr. Kiran Musunuru, one of the lead scientists. “And this is just the beginning.”

KJ isn’t just a patient. He’s a blueprint.

His treatment opens the door to a new kind of medicine:

• Standardized delivery systems
  

• Modular editing tools
  

• Custom-built guides for individual mutations
  

This isn’t theoretical anymore. It’s real. It worked. And it might rewrite what we think is possible for rare diseases, one edit at a time.

What if your future doctor doesn’t write a prescription...but rewrites your DNA?

⚡QUICK CUTS

The Gaming Billionaire Building
Brain Chips

While the world fixates on Elon Musk’s skull-drilling at Neuralink, another tech titan is betting on a quieter, subtler path to merging man and machine.

Gabe Newell — yes, the gaming billionaire behind Steam and Half-Life — has co-founded Starfish Neuroscience, a company developing a brain-computer interface that skips the wires and surgery. Instead of drilling into your skull, Starfish’s device is a soft, flexible patch that rests between the brain and skull. No implants. No fanfare.

In theory, it’s a game-changer.

In early trials (still limited to animals and lab settings), the device captured high-resolution neural activity related to movement, attention, even intent. Think prosthetics you control with a thought, or a computer that responds before you even reach for the mouse.

Newell has called the experience “transformative.” Bold words. But here’s the thing: there’s no peer-reviewed data, no FDA greenlight, no known trials in living people. Just investor excitement, lab-level results, and one very influential founder who believes the future of computing doesn’t involve screens, buttons, or even language.

Is he right? Possibly. After all, this is the guy who:

• Killed boxed software,
  

• Built the largest PC gaming platform in the world,
  

• And ghosted hardware before the rest of the industry realized it was toast.
  

But brain tech isn’t gaming. You don’t get to “patch” version 1.0 of something that connects to your cerebral cortex.

So, is this the future of human-computer interaction? Or just the latest in a long line of brain-tech moonshots that burn hot, raise capital, and fade quietly?

We’ll find out. The company plans to begin human trials in late 2025. Until then, the only thing we know for sure: the brain is the next interface. And billionaires are racing to claim it.

Would you Drink Coffee Grown in a Lab?

By 2050, more than half of today’s coffee-growing land could be gone, torched by rising temps, deforestation, and diseases like coffee rust. Your future morning ritual? Circling the drain.

Enter lab-grown coffee.

Startups like Atomo are cooking up a fix — literally. Some are growing real coffee cells in bioreactors, like the petri-dish burgers you’ve seen in the news. Others are reconstructing coffee from the molecular level up, using fermented plant waste and precision chemistry to mimic the aroma, flavor, and caffeine punch without ever touching a bean.

In blind taste tests, most people couldn’t tell the difference. In fact, many preferred it.

But this isn't about taste. It’s about survival. Growing coffee in a lab uses 94% less water, slashes carbon emissions, and doesn’t require clear-cutting rainforests. It's a climate contingency plan.

If the trend continues, the only coffee left might not come from Colombia or Ethiopia. It’ll come from a steel tank outside Seattle.

So ask yourself: If the taste is perfect but the plant is gone, is it still coffee, or just caffeine cosplay?

🧠 BRIEF BYTE

“CRISPR doesn’t just cut DNA – it’s rewriting the way we treat disease.”

-Jennifer Doudna

This is climate engineering dressed in fur and DNA.

The Dallas-based startup Colossal is using CRISPR gene editing to engineer Asian elephants with traits pulled from woolly mammoth DNA: thick fur, insulating fat, oxygen-rich blood. The goal isn’t a perfect mammoth clone, but a hybrid that can survive Arctic conditions.

Why bring them back? To fight climate change.

Colossal believes reintroducing herds into the tundra could reshape the ecosystem. By grazing and trampling snow, the animals would help restore grasslands, reflect sunlight, and keep carbon locked in frozen soil. This would lead to less melting ice and more climate stability.

It sounds like science fiction, but investors are betting real money: Colossal has raised over $435 million. The company claims the first calves could be born by 2028.

Of course, birthing a mammoth-hybrid in a lab and dropping it into the Arctic isn’t exactly a plug-and-play climate solution.

Skeptics call it a distraction: flashy de-extinction projects while living species vanish every day. But Colossal argues that the same tools used for mammoths can help conserve endangered elephants right now.

Whether it works or not, the project signals a new era: biology as climate engineering.

And if woolly mammoths do return to the Arctic, they won’t just be a spectacle. They’ll be an experiment in rewriting extinction itself.

YOUR TURN

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

This is the first of many.
Thanks for being part of the beginning.
Join us next week, the future’s just getting started!
— Mario, Founder