As gene edit­ing ex­plodes, a new re­port from Gold­man says Chi­nese groups are seiz­ing the lead on CRISPR and CAR-T stud­ies

Con­trary to what you might be­lieve, bio­phar­ma com­pa­nies in the US are not the lead­ers in clin­i­cal tri­als us­ing gene edit­ing tech. While a slate of US/Eu­ro­pean pi­o­neers have been lin­ing up their first hu­man tri­als, in­ves­ti­ga­tors in Chi­na are al­ready well ahead in test­ing CRISPR-edit­ed cells in hu­mans, ac­cord­ing to a deep dive on gene ther­a­pies from Gold­man Sachs an­a­lyst Salveen Richter.

“As of the end of Feb­ru­ary 2018,” Richter and her team re­port­ed, “there were nine reg­is­tered clin­i­cal stud­ies test­ing CRISPR-edit­ed cells to treat var­i­ous can­cers and HIV in­fec­tion in Chi­na, vs. on­ly one study in the U.S. All of the stud­ies were ini­ti­at­ed / spon­sored by top-tier pub­lic hos­pi­tals across Chi­na, and >80 pa­tients were re­port­ed as be­ing treat­ed by these in­ves­ti­ga­tion­al genome med­i­cines.”

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