Javon Ayers and his mother, Shakara Gross
A new player jumps into the heated race for a sickle cell cure, with help from Google's GV
For 17 years, Javon Ayers lived the life of most sickle cell kids: constant hospital visits, hand and foot syndrome, pneumonia and a removed spleen. In 2015, the family moved from Chicago to Georgia, which helped.
It proved a lucky break. This year, a doctor at the Children’s Hospital of Atlanta told him he may be eligible for an experimental gene therapy that could completely cure him. What followed was a NASA-level battery of tests, a bone marrow extraction-treatment-and-reinjection, chemotherapy and three months post-op in the hospital.
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