Sunday, September 13, 2026 Evidence-led medical research news
The First Cohort
Medical research, with the receipts

gene-editing

5 stories tagged "gene-editing"

Drugs & FDA

Sickle Cell Finally Has a Cure. It Costs $2.2 Million and Has Reached 64 People.

Casgevy has kept Victoria Gray crisis-free for seven years. Getting it still means wiping out a patient's bone marrow with a chemo tied to infertility and malignancy warnings and paying about $3 million all in, and two years after approval only 64 people have been infused.

Investigations

The Startup Selling 'Optimized' Babies Just Paid to Gene-Edit Human Embryos

Columbia scientists rewrote cholesterol and sickle-cell genes in human embryos, reaching 100 percent in embryos edited before their first division. The funder sells parents 'optimized' babies, and a germline edit like this could be inherited by every generation that follows.

Autoimmune & Inflammation

They Worried a Pig Kidney Would Burn the Bridge to a Human One. In the First Two Patients, It Didn't.

A gene-edited pig kidney kept Tim Andrews off dialysis for a record 271 days before it failed and came out. The worry was that it would leave his immune system too sensitized for a human match. In the first two patients, it hasn't.

Investigations

A Gene-Editing Trial Killed a Six-Year-Old. The Only Official Penalty Was a $3,500 Fine.

Xinhua Hospital paid about 24,000 yuan in September 2025. The death it was fined over stayed out of the medical literature for another ten months, and out of the Nature paper entirely.

Investigations

A Gene-Editing Trial Killed a 6-Year-Old. Nature Published the Science and Left Her Out of the Record.

Her parents paid $860,000 to base-edit their daughter's brain. She died of an immune reaction within a week, the trial's fatal outcome was never disclosed, and the Nature paper built on the same work never names her.