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The small study in patients with a rare disorder that causes liver and lung damage showed the potential for precisely targeted infusions.
Researchers have corrected a disease-causing gene mutation with a single infusion carrying a treatment that precisely targeted the errant gene.
This was the first time a mutated gene has been restored to normal.
The small study of nine patients announced Monday by the company Beam Therapeutics of Cambridge, Mass., involved fixing a spelling error involving the four base sequences — G, A, C and T — in DNA. The effect was to change an incorrect DNA letter to the right one. The result was a normal gene that functioned as it should, potentially halting liver and lung damage of patients with a rare disorder.
“This is the beginning of a new era of medicine,” said Dr. Kiran Musunuru, a gene therapy researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.
He added that the method offers the hope of treating other genetic diseases precisely by fixing mutations — an alternative to current gene therapies, which either add new genes to compensate for mutated ones, or slicing DNA to silence genes.
Dr. Musunuru is a co-founder and equity holder of Verve Therapeutics, a gene therapy company, and receives funding from Beam Therapeutics for research, but not for this study.
Dr. Richard P. Lifton, president of Rockefeller University and head of its Laboratory of Human Genetics and Genomics, said the sort of gene editing Beam did, rewriting genes with an infusion, “is a holy grail” that “has the promise for being a one-and-done kind of therapy.”