
Relying on an ultra-rare variant, David Liu unveils a new approach to editing sickle cell
There are now at least five different approaches to curing sickle cell in or nearing human testing from at least eight different companies or academic centers. But researchers have not stopped looking for improvements.
David Liu, the co-inventor of base editing and co-founder of Beam Therapeutics, unveiled in Nature Tuesday a new approach for using gene editing to turn patients’ sickling hemoglobin into a healthy form of the protein. If it plays out in humans, experts say, the strategy could offer a more direct and potentially safer way of treating the debilitating genetic disease.
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