Carl June speaking at a TIME Magazine event in 2019 (Getty Images)

Kym­ri­ah pi­o­neer Carl June is back, with first US hu­man ev­i­dence for CRISPR use in can­cer

At last: Some proof.

Eight years af­ter the first CRISPR pa­per ap­peared in Sci­ence and af­ter eight years of wran­gling over the tech­nol­o­gy’s po­ten­tial, Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia re­searchers have pub­lished some of the first ev­i­dence it can be used safe­ly in can­cer pa­tients.

The small study, pub­lished yes­ter­day in Sci­ence, is the first peer-re­viewed find­ings in the US show­ing CRISPR can safe­ly be used in hu­mans. Ver­tex and CRISPR Ther­a­peu­tics al­so an­nounced pos­i­tive re­sults from a sick­le cell pa­tient and a be­ta tha­lassemia pa­tient in No­vem­ber, but they have yet to pub­lish. Un­like the Penn re­searchers, Ver­tex and CRISPR claimed they showed both ef­fi­ca­cy and safe­ty re­sults.

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