WHO is­sues new guide­lines for gene edit­ing; Doud­na-backed Cari­bou launch­es its first al­lo­gene­ic CAR-T tri­al

Three years af­ter news of the birth of two gene-edit­ed ba­bies shocked ethi­cists, reg­u­la­tors and bi­ol­o­gists around the world, World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion ex­perts called for the es­tab­lish­ment of a new whis­tle-blow­ing mech­a­nism to help pre­vent fu­ture un­safe or un­eth­i­cal us­es of CRISPR and oth­er gene edit­ing tech­nolo­gies.

The rec­om­men­da­tion was one of a se­ries the WHO pan­el is­sued Mon­day in a pair of re­ports de­signed to guide glob­al gov­er­nance of gene edit­ing. The pan­el was con­vened in De­cem­ber 2018, weeks af­ter Chi­nese sci­en­tist He Jiankui an­nounced two ba­bies were born from em­bryos he edit­ed, and fol­lows a sim­i­lar ef­fort from the In­ter­na­tion­al Com­mis­sion on the Clin­i­cal Use of Hu­man Germline Genome Edit­ing, which re­leased a se­ries of rec­om­men­da­tions last year.

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